I have some good news to pass along today. Two months ago, I did a story about vandalism at the Shoal Creek Living History Museum in the Northland. I also wrote about it here on the blog. Vandals rampaged through several buildings on the museum's grounds, breaking numerous antiques and spraying a fire extinguisher in one of the buildings, coating several rooms in white dust. As I mentioned in my previous post, it was a senseless, terrible crime.

But the volunteers who keep the museum going weren't going to let this stop them. Immediately, they went to work, cleaning up the mess. It wasn't easy. They quickly discovered that if you used water on the fire extinguisher dust, it turned it into a sludge that was even more difficult to clean up. But with patience and perserverance, the volunteers cleaned up their beloved museum. In fact, people from the community stopped by to help out - some who had never even been to the museum before. They heard about the vandalism on the news and wanted to do something about it.

I visited the museum grounds again this week and I was impressed by the clean up efforts. There are still signs of the destruction, but things look much better. The dust as been cleaned up and other signs of the vandalism are disappearing as well. Yes, there's more work to be done. A front window will be replaced any day now, and the repair work on an antique loom still hasn't started yet. But if someone walked in today without knowing what happened, they might not even think about it. That's thanks to plenty of hard work by a group of dedicated people. I was so glad to see that the museum wasn't untracked by something so petty. Police are still looking for suspects in the vandalism. If you know anything, call the TIPS hotline at 816-474-TIPS.