Martha Parker sits on the steps of the Col. James Steele house she fought to save as the home of a museum celebrating the history of the Wakarusa River Valley. Although thwarted in that attempt, she and partners did win from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the conversion of a milk shed at the site as a museum. Parker will be honored from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday, April 22 at the museum for her long service to the museum and contributions to local history.

As she looked at a print from Kansas Territorial Days displayed in the Wakarusa River Valley Heritage Museum, Martha Parker pointed to man in the photograph.

“That man’s grandson hired me for my first teaching job,” she said.

From her birth 88 years ago to Les and Florence Demeritt on a farmstead just west of where the Clinton Lake dam now rises, Parker’s life has been entwined with the history of the Wakarusa Valley she has documented as author or co-author of two books.

Last week, the Douglas County Commission acknowledged Parker’s contribution with a proclamation declaring Saturday “Martha Parker Day.” The honor followed her recent resignation as executive director of the Wakarusa River Valley Heritage Museum after 43 years. There will be an open house to further honor Parker from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the museum on County Route 6.

Her association with the museum started in 1972 as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was buying up the farms in the Wakarusa River Valley to make way for Clinton Dam and the lake that would cover 7,000 acres of the rich bottomland upstream. As that process was underway, Parker attended a gathering of the Clinton Lake Landowners Association, those opposed to the dam project.

Parker and her late husband, Bob, lived on his family farm above the future reservoir, but she attended the meeting to advocate saving the stately brick home in the town of Bloomington. Although the future reservoir would not flood the town on a bluff overlooking the valley, it was to disappear to make way for a park and other Corps needs. Looking for help researching the origins of the house, she soon called Roy Laird, a University of Kansas political science professor who spoke at the meeting.

She didn’t connect with the professor but found a partner in his wife, Betty Laird.

“My husband was going to class, but I asked, ‘Can I help you?'” Laird recalled. “We met the next day on the steps of the Douglas County Courthouse to do research on the house.”

The two women discovered Bloomington founder Col. James Steele built the house, and they made it their mission to save his home as a museum celebrating the history of the Wakarusa Valley.

It didn’t seem a far-fetched idea. The empty house had been inhabited before the Corps secured its ownership, and it remained in good shape when the Clinton Lake Historical Society received a letter from a Corps official stating the house would be turned over to the group as a museum. But vandalism and the Corps’ prolonged inaction thwarted that promise, despite Parker and Laird securing the house’s place on the National Register of Historic Places.

In the mid-1980s, the Corps did offer an agreement making possible a museum, but it viewed the house too far gone to save.

“Finally after 13 years, we signed a memorandum of understanding,” Parker said. “Every time you sign one of those, you know you are going to lose. In return for dismantling the house, they agreed to make the old milk shed the museum, build the courtyard and stage and gave us 3 acres. They gave us a 100-year lease.”

By that time, Parker and Laird had established a tight partnership. In 1976, they published “Soil of Our Souls: Histories of the Clinton Lake Communities.” It sold out and has been reprinted six times with the proceeds benefiting the museum. Laird said Parker became a very good researcher with a knack for getting people to share stories.

“She is like a bulldog,” Laird said of her friend. “Once she got onto something, there was no turning her back.”

They also started creating exhibit panels of various aspects of Wakarusa Valley history before they had a local museum in which to display them.

“When Betty and I started working together, we didn’t have anything,” she said. “We just started collecting things. The first exhibit, we didn’t have any place to put it. We put it together in the basement of the Watkins Museum.”

The first exhibit, which explored the first 20 years of the 10 valley communities the dam’s construction erased or affected, was displayed in the Douglas County Courthouse and various other places around the county. It was followed about every two years by exhibits on such topics as religion, the land, weather, transportation, schools and the valley residents’ experiences in wars, from the Spanish-American War to the Gulf War.

“We worked so hard,” Parker said of her collaboration with Laird on the exhibits. “We never argued. It takes a lot of time. First you have to come up the idea, then you have to develop the narrative and then put together the collection.”

Because of the support from the valley’s past and current residents intent on saving their family histories, that last task often meant deciding which photographs or artifacts to leave out of exhibits.

“We probably have 150 photos we haven’t used,” Parker said. “The people of this valley have been fantastic. They were a very proud people. It really hurt them when they were forced to give up the land. When they bring it up, tears come to their eyes.”

Valley residents also contributed documentation for an exhibit a former museum intern who would marry Parker’s grandson completed as one of the museum’s permanent exhibits. It told the story of the valley’s prominence in the Underground Railroad, a theme Parker would explore further with the same source material in her 1999 book, “Angels of Freedom.”

In addition to being at museum during its weekly hours of 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday from May through September, Parker recorded “hundreds and hundreds of hours of oral history,” gave tours of the valley, was part of a quilting circle that completed more than 300 quilts sold to support the museum, and spearheaded the 2014 expansion that added the Heritage Hall exhibit space.

In her many years, Parker has witnessed the museum’s strained relationship with the Corps warm to the point officials now express pride of what they’ve done for the valley.

Although she stepped down as the museum’s executive director and no longer attends its board meetings in a lower-level room added in the expansion named for her and her late husband, Parker admits there is no way she can completely separate from the museum. No one else knows where files and items are in the museum’s closets or stored away in the old Wakarusa Valley Elementary School, or the ins and outs of everyday museum details learned from long hours at the site.

“It’s my second home,” she said. “It is so much a part of me and my life. My husband said, ‘It’s taking over your life,’ but it was a labor of love.”

Nonetheless, Parker does intend to step back. She has full confidence in the historical society’s president, Denise Curtis, and she was eager to meet the recently hired museum manager. She also focused on the goal of getting a planned meeting hall built at the museum site. Although a time and date has been not been set, there will be public meeting on that project in May at the Douglas County Fairgrounds, she said.

“There’s a big need,” she said. “There’s no meeting place in the lake area. All the schools are consolidated, and the old churches are gone or underwater.

“The next thing is to get the plans out to the general public to critique. Then we start fundraising. That will be a big job. I know quite a few people I’m going to call,” she said.