The Eudora Community Museum completed its $100,000 renovation and expansion with a day to spare. Ben Terwilliger, executive director of the Eudora Area Historical Society, said the final touches on the project of trimming out a utility closet were finished Thursday. Then on Friday morning, 20 crates containing the contents of the Smithsonian traveling exhibit “Water/Ways” were delivered to the museum, he said.

The renovation and expansion project was undertaken so that the museum could host the exhibit after the Kansas Humanities Council last year selected Eudora as the first community in the exhibit’s seven-city tour. It will be on display from June 24 through Aug. 6 in Eudora and is free to the public.

The museum’s upgrades benefited from a Douglas County Cultural and Natural Heritage Conservation Grant of $89,000. The project added an extension that provides room for a stairway and elevator from the bottom to top floor of the old storefront. The top floor previously could be reached only by a door that connected to a rear outside stairway. The project also renovated the second floor, which was not touched when the bottom floor was rebuilt before the museum’s opening in March 2015.

The delivery of the exhibit crates had Terwilliger scratching his head Friday morning. They were too big to transport to the upper floor by either the elevator or stairway, he said. He had requested use of a city forklift to help with the job via the rear doorway, but eventually determined that the elevator would do the trick.

The “Water/Ways” exhibit explores relationships between people and water, which is a natural in a community that sits on the confluence of the Wakarusa and Kansas rivers, Terwilliger said. The museum is planning a companion exhibit of Eudora’s experience with the 1951 flood, he said. It will include photos and first-person accounts.

Many local visitors to the exhibit will be just as interested in the renovations, Terwilliger said. He thinks they will be pleased with the work of volunteers Benny Dean and Bill Gordon. The two men installed new flooring in the upper level, painted and plastered walls, did the trim work and more, he said.

“We are very pleased and impressed with how it turned out,” he said. “We were able to preserve a lot of the 1870s features of the window, brick and woodwork. It definitely has a 1870s feel to it.”

The steering committee charged with raising funds for a new Eudora Township Public Library released the results Monday of phase 1 of its capital campaign. The goal of the campaign is to raise $1 million of the $3 million to $3.5 million dollars needed to build a new 12,000-square-foot building to replace the current 40-year-old 4,000-square-foot library.

Committee chairman Don Grosdidier said phase 1 raised $148,000 from “interfamily” donors, or those who are on the steering committee or library board.

“This is a start,” he said. “We were feeling pretty good about that. It is kind of startup money.”

Phase 2 of the fundraising campaign will seek to raise donations of $10,000 or more from businesses and individuals, Grosdidier said. It will also include a number of fundraising events. The final phase will seek to secure grants and explore such public financing options as tax credits.

The steering committee has also been busy completing the legal steps needed for the campaign, Grosdidier said.

“All donations (go) through the Douglas County Community Foundation,” he said. “We have it all planned out now. It’s just a matter of going to work on the donor list we have and creating awareness for the need for a new library.”

The Baldwin City Chamber of Commerce will have an official unveiling at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday of the mural painted last month at 608 High St. Chamber director Jeannette Blackmar said Ella Conover, Alaina Schiffelbein and Meagan Young, three artist apprentices who helped with the mural, will explain the story behind the mural’s design and the meaning of its features, including the large maple leaf pods that dominate the work.

After the unveiling, Blackmar will attend the 7 p.m. Baldwin City Council meeting at the Baldwin City Library to explain the importance of murals for community cultural enrichment and as stimulus for economic development. It’s the goal of the chamber that the mural will encourage other works in the community, she said.