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Doni: Lakes are not only the most important natural resource in the world, but they also represent thousands of years of history.

The National Museum of the Great Lakes tells their all inspiring stories through breathtaking photography.

Over 300 incredible artifacts, powerful audio visual displays, and 40 hands on interactive exhibits.

The narrative spans century from the intrepid fur traders of the 1600s to the brave underground railroad operators of the 1800s, the daring rum runners of the 1900s and the modern day sailors navigating the thousand footers.

Their stories are as diverse as the people who shaped the history of the Great Lakes.

These words, in part, come directly from the museum's website.

Who would know better?

The dozens of reasons that make a visit there one of the best ways to spend your day.

Today we're talking to museum executive director Kate Fineske.

I'm Doni Miller.

Welcome to the Point Connect with us on our social media pages.

You may email me at Doni underscore Miller at wgte dot org.

As you know, for this episode and any other additional extras that you might like to see also go to wgte dot org slash to the point I'm so excited to have Kate Fineske here with me today.

You are the executive director of the National Museum of the Great Lakes.

And people should know who you are because that is an amazing, amazing organization that you run.

Kate : Yeah, I absolutely am thrilled to be there.

It's really has felt like my life coming full circle to land at an arts and culture institution.

Arts and culture has always been near and dear to my heart.

From the time when I was very little and to the present day.

So it has been a wonderful road to getting to where I'm at right now.

Doni: That's so, so good to know.

And for people who don't know much about the museum, I encourage you to go to their website.

It's one of the most informative websites I've had the opportunity to visit.

But if you haven't been to the website, Kate's going to tell us about the museum today.

So what is the museum for folks who don't know?

Kate: Yeah, so the National Museum of the Great Lakes is owned and operated by the Great Lakes Historical Society.

So the museum is Toledo's newest cultural entity.

It joined the Toledo landscape in 2014, but the Great Lakes Historical Society has actually been around for 80 years now.

No kidding.

They began in the basement of the Cleveland Public Library, producing a quarterly inland seas journal that we still produce today, really just chronicles in Great Lakes history, sharing Great Lakes stories, really getting people connected with great Lakes in general.

And it's funny, you know, when you start writing about Great Lakes history, you reach a lot of Great Lakes history enthusiasts who also happen to be collectors.

So that's what happened.

We began to be collectors of Great Lakes history, and we very quickly outgrew the basement of the Cleveland Public Library and moved to our first museum space in Vermillion, Ohio.

It was the Wakefield home that was donated for our use.

It ultimately became the Inland Seas Maritime Museum.

And if you've been to Vermillion before, it is just this cute little sleepy seaside town on Lake Erie and the museum and its collection just grew and grew and grew.

And what made it very different from other maritime museum collections was its scope.

We weren't about Vermillion history or Cleveland history or Lake Erie itself.

Our collection contained a scope from all five Great Lakes, US and Canadian history.

So sometime in the probably mid eighties or so, our board just had a vision to grow, and that vision brought us to Toledo, Ohio, and to what we now call the National Museum of the Great Lakes, which is 11,000 square feet of interior museum exhibit space.

It's open all year round.

We also have a 617 foot lake frater from 1911.

The colonel James M .Schoomaker Doni: Can we visit that?

Kate: Absolutely.

It's fully durable.

Now, the museum ships, because we have two of them.

We also have the museum Tug Ohio, which is a 120 year old tug boat fully to our old ball again, those are only open from May 1st until October 31st because of the weather related erect around here.

But they are open and even when they're not open fully explorable the our website which you mentioned.

That's right.

That's right for all of them.

So that they really are completely open and accessible all the time.

Doni: That's so why would you say to somebody who is thinking about touring the museum but not quite sure that they want to do it?

What's the best reason for them to go there?

Kate: You are going to be blown away.

Doni: You promise?

Kate: I promise.

You are going to be blown away.

If you love the lakes, if you love museums, if you love history, or if you just love exploring.

We have it all at the National Museum of the Great Lakes.

When you arrive, you will be greeted by this seven minute interactive theater presentation with the skies lighting up during a lightning storm, the lakes shining right in front of you.

You really get immersed in the understanding of what the museum is about.

Then, within the contents of the inside of the museum, we have three main galleries that can be explored in any way direction that you prefer.

It is for any age.

So youth, adult.

There is not a thing in there that a small child can touch that they're going to hurt.

We really cater to anybody's learning style, so you might be a reader.

We have plenty to read.

You might be, you know, physically if you want to do something, we have lots of things that you can interact with and engage with and do.

You might learn by watching videos, you might learn by just interacting.

And you know, there is pretty much any thing of learning style right behind us is our maritime theater that highlights and showcase some of our boats and interactivity and explain and shine a light on it and put a mini theater presentation on for you.

So it really is Smithsonian quality exhibit space in the museum and then the ship itself.

I mean, really, it's incredible.

How often do you get to be on top of a large lake freighter and really explore?

And I am telling you right now, it's probably the best view of downtown Toledo that there is.

You really just get to look around and just discover and see and be proud that you're from this region and that you're from Toledo and that you have the only National Museum of the Great Lakes right here in downtown Toledo.

Doni: Well, if you are this excited every day, there is no reason that everyone should not be rushing down to that museum.

It sounds amazing.

Kate: Yeah, it's incredible.

Doni: Sounds amazing.

And you just had an anniversary.

Kate: We did.

So we just celebrated ten years here in Toledo, our ten year anniversary, April 22nd, I believe, was the actual day.

Very exciting for us.

I mean, it really the first decade of move was really all about moving and building a foundation for growth here in Toledo.

And we have certainly done that.

I mean, when we moved here, we we had the Interior museum space that we've continued to update and add artifacts to the collection.

But in addition to that, you know, the museum vessel was here.

We also, in 2019, brought the tugboat here.

And then just about a year and a half ago, we bought the pilot house from the St Marys Challenger.

Let me tell you a little bit about it.

Doni: What is a pilot house.

Kate: A pilot house is where the wheel is.

So it's where they're steering the ship or steering the the vessel or the boat on the lakes.

It's absolutely okay to call a ship a boat on the Great Lakes, believe it or not.

So the pilot house is up at the top.

And you know, there are the Colonel James M. Schoomaker museum ship is our single largest artifact, but it is not fully accessible to everyone.

There are a lot of limitations to getting up onto that vessel and really to getting on board up to the pilot house.

So by bringing the pilot house of the Saint Mary's challenger to our grounds, we're hoping we're restoring it back to the last days of the lake so that we can make a pilot has experience accessible to everyone.

Not just that, though.

Listen to where this pilot house came from.

The Saint Mary's challenger is thought to be the world's longest sailing vessel 108 years.

It plied the Great Lakes and its hull is actually still operating as a tug barge.

Stay.

In fact, in when we brought the pilot house over, it had been sitting in Midwest terminals in storage for some time.

And then the pandemic hit.

We had to bring it down on a barge, lift it up and bring it on to the museum grounds at the same point of where it could have been anywhere in the Great Lakes.

But the hull happened to be operating on the Maumee River and passed by its pilot house.

Doni: No kidding.

Kate: The crew and the vessel actually pulled over and they came in.

They watched the pilot house be placed on the museum grounds.

It's a very, very exciting.

And what it's doing is providing an anchor to our future expansion that just broke ground last week.

Doni: You know, I read that one of the things that people don't think about when they think about the museum is that there has been substantial contribution to economics, social change, not to mention the bringing of history right to our front door.

Would you agree with those things lately?

Kate: There's a lot of things that folks need to be proud about, about having the National Museum in the Great Lakes.

First and foremost, we are the only National Museum of the Great Lakes.

Let me just quickly pinpoint in on that.

There are close to 100 other maritime museums across the Great Lakes, and they are fabulous and wonderful and we do a lot of partnership work with them.

In fact, we're about ready to open up an exhibit over Memorial Day weekend at Saint Joseph and their Maritime museum there.

And so there's a lot of work to be done.

But of all those 100, about 100 maritime museums, what makes us different?

Those museums are incredible.

They cover typically the maritime history of the community they serve on, or maybe the body of water they sit on, or a certain type of scope.

Shipwrecks, the sea lots we cover all of that.

All five Great Lakes, US and Canadian history.

We are this essentially the Smithsonian, but we aren't the Smithsonian of the Great Lakes.

Doni: So that makes you the national.

Kate: That's what makes us the National Museum of the Great Lakes.

It's really, truly our scope.

So Toledo has that to be proud of.

But there's other things because we are bringing folks from outside of this region.

Since we've opened, we've had visitors from all 50 states and over 30 countries come and visit our museum.

You may recall that for the longest time we actually began kind of the the efforts on the east side of the river and the redevelopment over there.

We were, Doni: which is amazing, by the way, Kate: the road to nowhere but us.

Doni: That's right.

Right.

That's true.

Kate: And since then, you've seen the beauty of the Glass City Metroparks and the Metroparks in general really just add to our downtown, which is so, so exciting.

But.

But we started that.

Doni: You absolutely did.

I want you to hold that thought.

Okay.

We're going to start there when we come back.

Kate: Absolutely.

We need to go away for a minute, but don't you go anywhere.

We'll be right back.

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Doni: welcome back.

As you know, you may connect with us on our social media pages.

You can also email me at Doni underscore Miller at wgte dot org and for this episode and any others, you might also go to wgte dot org slash to that point.

My pleasure to have Kate Fineske here with us this morning.

The executive director of the National Museum of the Great Lakes.

And we were talking about just the economic impact that that the museum has had on the east side of town.

I remember quite well, in fact, driving down that street and seeing you guys being the only beacon on that side and it's amazing over there.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Kate: It was the road to nowhere but us.

When I arrived in 2019 and moved to work at the museum, that was where we were at.

And since then we have just this beautiful neighbor in the Glass City metroparks.

And what's been exciting about that is we really, truly make the perfect pair.

So since we moved here in 2014, we've been bringing folks from all over the country, all over the world to visit us.

And typically they come were easy access right off the expressway.

They come, they visit us and they move on to their next point.

Right.

And we know just just to bring some data connected to that, we have about between 2500 2900 members at any given time over the year.

And it kind of fluxes in between that over 60% of our members are located outside of Lucas County.

Doni: No kidding.

In fact, do you market outside?

How do they know?

Kate: You know, there are there are a lot of different ways to market.

A lot of it is word of mouth.

We utilize social media.

There's a lot of growth that we can do.

But to be quite honest, because we've been around for 80 years, we have a lot of people that know us simply from our journal that they've been reading.

So we have members that are members that maybe even haven't visited us before, but they've always subscribed to our journal and that brings them.

Then when we moved to Toledo, when we expanded, you know, when we've made some of these bigger changes, it brings them to Toledo.

And we you know, we know that we have been bringing folks in fact, what we found was really interesting.

We we take this data and we knew it.

But Destination Toledo, which is our tourism bureau here, they did data tracking, using cell phones and heat maps.

And they found something really extraordinary and it was something we always knew.

But to be able to pinpoint it, over 70% of the individuals that come and spend at least an hour on our museum grounds also spend at least one night in a hotel.

Wow.

And so we knew for a long time that we've been bringing people here.

Now, let's fast forward to the Glass City.

Metroparks opening up, right?

They're bringing Lucas County taxpayers down to see this new state of the art park.

Doni: Incredible absolutely, incredible park down here.

The way those folks are coming down and they're saying, what's that?

What's that big boat right there?

We have a National Museum of the Great Lakes.

I need to go check that out.

And the flip side of that is we're now bringing people in to Toledo to come look at the National Museum of the Great Lakes.

And they're saying, it doesn't end here.

Let me go over and explore Toledo.

Let me stay longer.

Let me come back.

Let me tell people.

That's right.

Let's go in and it opens up incredible partnerships.

Doni: You must be so proud of that.

You're relatively new.

Kate: I am.

So I joined the team in 2019 because we knew that we were growing the pandemic hit shortly after I joined the team.

But we still continued to grow even with the pandemic in 2022, we actually had our highest visitation.

We had just over 21,000 visitors in 2023, though, when the Glass City Metro Park opened.

And you have to remember it didn't open until the end of June.

So midway the year, through Kate: 46% increase in visitation, we went over 30,000 visitors and they were only open for half a year.

So we know that there's this audience locally that we can start to bring in to what we're doing.

And, you know, not only that, why Toledo?

Toledo has I mean, we were established here because of our location connected to the Great Lakes.

Doni: Yeah.

And in our conversation before the show, I recall your saying that you came here, you fell in love with the city.

Did fell in love with the city.

There's lots here to love.

And you guys are just adding to it?

Kate: Absolutely.

I lovingly refer to Toledo as the cultural capital of the state of Ohio.

We have every single arts and cultural activity here, and I would venture to say that we do it better than anywhere else.

The National Museum of the Great Lakes is a great complement to all the other incredible opportunities that we have for visitors that are coming and for people that reside in the Toledo area.

I love Toledo.

I'm proud and passionate about our community.

And when I found the National Museum of the Great Lakes in 2017, I just knew that there were so many ways that this organization can grow.

And I just brought that passion with me when I came to Doni: great segue way to my next question.

So you've been here in a relatively short time in the museum, a relatively short time.

What's your vision?

How do you intend to change it, make it better, or as though it could be better, but move it forward?

Yeah, absolutely.

Kate: Well, so there had been some conversations for a couple of years about eventually we have an incredible emeritus director who had been our executive director for 25 years who was considering moving towards retire, and there had been conversations about me moving into this role not quite so quickly.

When the Glass City Metroparks opened up, we we knew we wanted to make that change a little bit quicker because we were growing 2014.

We had two and a half staff members.

We now bring in we have 25 employees part time, including part time, seasonal and full time staff.

So we've done a lot of lot of growing.

And so, you know, our vision is really extraordinary.

That first wave of growth was really just to get us embedded here into the community.

You know, our vision now as we enter into the second decade here in Toledo is to become the gathering place of Great Lakes conversations.

And that's really exciting.

You know, we have the only National Museum of the Great Lakes here in Toledo.

How can and now we have this beautiful park system.

It's incredible.

Downtown.

And how can we start to bring more of the conversations, whether it's industry conversations, recreational conversations, water quality, environmental conversation to history conversations right here to Toledo.

Doni: What do you think the most critical conversation is of all?

Kate: I dont think there any more critical than the fact that our Great Lakes are a resource that we have in this region that many other folks don't have fresh water is, you know, going to be truly it's already important, but it's become more and more important as we move forward in the future.

I always say that history is happening now.

So our history and we're a history museum, our mission is to preserve and make known the history of the Great Lakes.

So all of the critical issues that we're looking at now are our history coming up.

And so I think there's a lot of issues to explore.

The point is, is there's not another place across the great Lakes that people automatically think, if I need to have a conversation related to the Great Lakes, I should have it there.

And, you know, our hope my hope is that Toledo becomes that place, that place for that conversation.

Doni: So you are not only an institution that preserves the history and champions the Great Lakes through that history, but you are also an advocate for all things related, all conversations, all issues, anything that relates to the Great Lakes.

Kate: And what's so exciting is that our second wave is all we just broke ground on a 5000 square foot expansion to our museum exhibit space, and a majority of that space is going to be used for community conversation builders.

So we will have a small portion that'll be new permanent exhibit space that will lead into the pilot house of the St Marys challenger.

Believe it or not, the first wave is almost complete and that's moving our entire collection to the Toledo area, really floor to ceiling of our entire museum.

Space is fully covered.

It's only 10% of our collection, so we're about halfway through the process of moving our collection from Vermillion and a couple other stations Doni: oh so you still have things in other places Yep Yep Katy: the Toledo area.

And then we'll be able to display that in our new permanent area.

But a big part is we're going to have dedicated space for temporary exhibits so that we can start to bring new conversations, new exhibits, new thoughts, new ideas connected to the Great Lakes on a more regular basis.

Smithsonian quality exhibits regularly to our museum.

And then we're going to have dedicated space for Great Lakes community education.

Doni: That's amazing.

And people so people who have been have lots of reasons to come back.

Kate: Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And that's what's truly important.

You know, the first ten years, we've continued to add to what we have so that we have new experiences in our permanent exhibit.

But we need to have an opportunity to be able to exchange and interchange new exhibits from all over and have different conversations.

And we've been, you know, something that a lot of folks don't realize about the museum is that we do not receive local, state or federal annual operating funds.

Doni: That was going to be my question, actually.

How are you managing to keep this growing organization afloat?

Katy: Well, I mean, just to give you some context wrapped around the financial growth of the museum, when we were in Vermillion, we had about a $300,000 operating budget, annual operating budget.

We now have a $1.2 million operating budget.

So there's definitely growth there happening.

What's really interesting is prior to, you know, I just became the executive director in January of this year.

Prior to that, I was responsible for all the revenue generation and our revenue generation with that $1.2 million operating budget.

It's about half derived from fundraising efforts and about half derived from earned revenue.

So that may be membership, that may be visitation, that may be point of sales and our museum stores, that may be partially programs.

We've worked really hard to make sure that our museum is fully accessible to those, even if they can't afford to come to it on a regular basis.

We launched two years ago our Museums for All initiative that allows people who receive SNAP benefits to use their EBT card to access our museum and a portion of our programing for free.

We also have multiple free community open days.

One of our largest has been in the past over Martin Luther King Day.

We open up that entire weekend for free.

We had over 2500 visitors there in 2022.

Doni: So before we go, we just have a few minutes left.

It's important for people to know that it is a museum for all, whether you can pay or not.

There's there's a way for you to visit.

What would you like to leave people with?

Kate: I would love to encourage folks, if you haven't been to visit us, to come and visit us, try us out for yourself.

If you're local, consider a membership.

100% of those proceeds go back to supporting our mission and then take a look at what we're doing and what we're building and how we're becoming the gathering place of Great Lakes conversations.

I really encourage everybody to visit us online at NMGL dot org and NMGL dot org backslash the second wave all spelled out.

You can take a virtual fly through of our tour and really see the expansion that's happening.

Doni: Kate, Thank you so much for being with us.

Thanks.

Really.

I hope you come back.

I hope you come back and thank you all for being with us today.

Enjoy the day.

I will see you next time.

On to the Point.

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They do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of WGTE public media to the point is supported in part by American Rescue Plan Act, funds allocated by the City of Toledo and the Lucas County Commissioners and administered by the Arts Commission and viewers like you.

Thank you.