LAKE COUNTY Indian Museum seeking new home

Amateur archeologists who found a burial ground began the collection.
PAINESVILLE, Ohio (AP) -- A museum that showcases American-Indian artifacts and teaches schoolchildren about how they lived generations ago is searching for a new home.
Officials at the Indian Museum of Lake County aren't sure where they'll display their 32,106-piece collection once the museum has to move in January from its one room at Lake Erie College.
There have been no offers yet of a new home for the 25-year-old nonprofit museum, which was started by a group of amateur archaeologists who unearthed an Indian burial ground.
"We're being very upbeat and thinking that something will come up," director Ann Dewald said. "We may have to do an interim small space; we may have to put it all in storage for a while."
Lake Erie College officials say the museum's space is needed to accommodate increasing enrollment at the private school in this city about 30 miles northeast of Cleveland.
Educational value
More than 6,000 museum visitors have seen tiny fragments of deer bone and spear heads, among other items, and learned about the Erie, Seneca and Iroquois nations. Kids on field trips can grind corn with a mortar and pestle, and take part in a mock archaeological dig.
Mary Battung, a kindergarten teacher at Leroy Elementary in Painesville Township, has been taking her classes to the museum for 17 years around Thanksgiving, when the children learn about Indians and the holiday.
"The Indian Museum does a wonderful job making it developmentally appropriate to this age group," she said.
"They make it interesting and fun, and it's academically oriented."
A large portion of the exhibit is dedicated to the Reeve Village Site, where hundreds of Indian artifacts were collected along the Chagrin River in Northeast Ohio in 1973. The archaeologists opened the museum in 1980 to display some of the finds, some of which are 400 to 1,100 years old.
One item is an etched stone that tells of a young brave who slaughtered a deer but then was transformed into a half-deer by gods angry that he violated custom by wasting part of the animal's hide.
"A lot of history would be lost if we cannot find a new home," Dewald said. "You will not find these pieces anywhere else."