Following the closure last December of the Five Oaks Museum in Bethany, decades worth of Washington County history are now at risk.

The Washington County Board of Commissioners is weighing what to do with the museum building and the several thousand artifacts in its collection, as financial issues have become insurmountable.

The board has discussed selling the collection, transitioning the building into an archive and document imaging center, and seeking new owners for the museum.

In the midst of this discussion, those who used to work with the museum want the county to consider the value of the local history it contains.

“It would be such a tragedy for our county to lose all of these things,” archivist Eva Guggemos said. She worked with the museum for more than a decade on collections policy and served on its cultural resources committee.

The museum’s collection is the record of Washington County’s people and past, Guggemos said.

Nearly a century of county history

The Five Oaks Museum can trace its origins to a large donation from a local newspaper man. Albert Tozier was the founder of the Hillsboro Independent in the 1890s, which later became the Hillsboro Argus before ending its century-plus run in 2017.

In the 1930s, Tozier donated his personal collection of documents, photos, and household and farm items to “the people of Washington County” to form the basis of the museum.

The collection moved several times in the 20th Century before landing at the Portland Community College Rock Creek Campus. The Washington County Historical Society began its role in overseeing the collection after its founding in 1956.

Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, the county took a more active role in the museum and opened a new version to the public in 1983.

Four years later, the county decided it no longer wanted to be in charge of overseeing the collection and entered an agreement with the historical society to run the museum. The county, however, maintained ownership of the collection and paid a large share of the museum’s operating expenses.

In January 2020, with new leadership on board, the Washington County Museum became the Five Oaks Museum as part of a broader rebranding of its image and perspective.

The new leaders at Five Oaks sought to transform the museum from a white settler-centered focus to include more historically ignored narratives.

In pursuit of that new mission, the museum brought in an artist from the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde to re-work its exhibit on Oregon’s Kalapuya people. It also launched exhibits highlighting the lives and art of trans and genderqueer artists, LatinX youth activism in Forest Grove and the displacement of native Hawaiians to the Pacific Northwest.

Funding woes

Leaders in Washington County learned of the museum’s financial troubles in December, when the museum’s board informed county officials it would need to close.

The museum closed that month and laid off its staff in January.

The county’s contribution to the museum’s budget has been shrinking in recent years, just as the museum’s expenses and overall budget have grown.

For fiscal year 2023-2024, the county provided $173,692. That was down from $231,589 the previous year. According to the museum’s adopted budget for 2024-2025, the annual cost for operating the museum is just under $600,000.

Just five years prior, the museum’s budget was about half that amount, according to Mariah Berlanga-Shevchuk, who worked as both the cultural resources manager and director of exhibitions and cultural resources at the museum from 2020 to 2023.

Like many museums and nonprofits, Berlanga-Shevchuck said Five Oaks was impacted by a recent economic downturn. While contributions from the local government often shrink during a downturn, private donors also often decrease or cancel their donations. At the same time, grants become more competitive. All of these factors add up to tougher financial outlooks for institutions like Five Oaks.

Unlike other museums and nonprofits, Berlanga Shevchuck said Five Oaks did not keep an operating reserve fund.

Now, leaders in Washington County are leery of taking on the expense of running the museum.

“The public has not loved the museum enough for it to be sustainable,” Washington County Board of Commissioners Chair Kathryn Harrington said during an August meeting.

The collection

Washington County staff described the museum’s collection in two categories: documents, which include records, maps and photos; and artifacts or three-dimensional historic objects.

The collection includes every edition ever printed of the Hillsboro Independent and Argus newspapers, dating back to the 1890s, 19th-century cameras and pharmaceuticals, a Washington County telephone switchboard, Native American mortars and pestles, decades-old dental equipment, the county’s first jail – a tiny log structure that operated from 1853-1970 - and more.

Berlanga-Shevchuck described it as family and business materials from people who lived and worked in Washington County over the past 150 years.

Washington County staff in charge of shutting down the museum were bemused at its contents.

“I’m not a museum curator, so I see a lot of things, a lot of shelf space,” Joe Nelson said.

Nelson is the county director of assessment and taxation and has been tasked with helping the county navigate the museum’s shutdown.

Without experts to catalog and itemize the artifacts, Nelson said the county decided to quantify the collection by the physical space it takes up — 19,000 cubic feet in artifacts and 1,000 square feet of documents.

Five Oaks left the county only a “rudimentary” inventory, Nelson said.

Berlanga-Shevchuck, the former collections manager, said the museum staff was never able to take a complete inventory of the collection for a number of reasons.

“Based on the size and the organization and the turnover of staff and the way that museum collecting has changed and been professionalized and formalized in the last, probably, 40 or 50 years. And knowing that this collection predates that formalization process, it is not possible for any one person to know exactly what is in that collection,” she said.

Even with the help of other museum collection managers and professional registrars, Berlanga-Shevchuck said she and her predecessor were only able to inventory a small portion of the collection.

Returning Native American artifacts

Before its closure, Five Oaks had undertaken an effort to return some of its collection that once belonged to Indigenous people of the region. The effort was part of Berlanga-Shevchuck’s work.

She collaborated with the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde’s Chacalu Museum and Cultural Center.

Berlag-Shevchuck said that the tribes particularly wanted funerary and ritualistic items repatriated, but permitted Five Oaks to keep items that were associated more with daily activities, such as the mortars and pestles.

For the items kept by Five Oaks, Berlag-Shevchuck said the tribes asked that they be presented in an accurate and culturally appropriate manner rather than as if they belonged to some long-gone group of people, which was the case prior to Five Oaks’ rebrand.

“They were more OK with us keeping those in our collection, and just being forthcoming with Grand Ronde about what we did have,” Berlag-Shevchuck said.

Sara Thompson, a spokesperson for the Grand Ronde, said the tribes have not yet discussed Washington County continuing to repatriate items, but said they would “welcome such a conversation.”

Returning artifacts to tribes like the Grand Ronde “may be one of the courses of action” in the future, Nelson said, but right now the county’s focus is on keeping the collection safe.

What comes next

After the museum announced its closure, county staff presented the commission with multiple options, including selling off artifacts, sending them to other museums or institutions, finding a new organization to run the museum or continuing to operate the facility as an archival research and document imaging center.

Staff also explained that Oregon public records law requires the county to maintain some of the documents stored at the museum, which are official government records.

County leaders did not seem interested in running the museum without some sort of partnership and additional funding to meet the $600,000 annual cost.

Though there have been no formal decisions, commissioners appear inclined to explore the imaging and research center option while looking for new museum operators.

County officials shared it may take a year or more to find a new museum operator, and even then, they said they may not find any takers.

Berlanga-Shevchuk said the people best equipped to run the museum are the Five Oaks leaders, who just handed the reins over to the county.

The county expects that running the museum simply as an archival document and imaging center would cost about $200,000 annually. That was with the assumption that the center is run by one museum specialist, but what the center would look like and how it would run has not been entirely fleshed out.

No matter what happens, Berlanga-Shevchuk and Guggemos shared their belief that the collection should not be broken up and dispersed to other organizations.

Having the collection sold off or locked away in a storage facility is the last thing they want.

“It’s unique that it represents the county, both from the governmental side and from the community side,” Berlanga-Shevchuk said. “And there’s a lot of value in keeping the collection together, because of the way that it’s been collected, the way it’s been assembled over the years.”

She also pointed out that the county has a duty to uphold the wishes of those who donated their personal belongings to the museum.

“I know that there were several families — even in the time that I was there — who did reach out about wanting their objects back, or wanting to make sure that the terms of their deed of gift were being met,” Berlanga-Shevchuk said.

The commission will decide what path to take at a future meeting.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/16/five-oaks-museum-washington-county-history-closed-funding/