Grant to help fund elevator for city museum
WOONSOCKET — Local legislators have included a city veteran’s museum in their annual legislative grant requests that could help it raise additional funding for a needed elevator.
Rep. Stephen M. Casey (DDist. 50, Woonsocket), deputy majority leader, said the House has awarded a $5,000 grant to the Veterans Memorial Museum operated by Glenn Dusablon on the third floor of the AmericanFrench Genealogical Society building at 78 Earle St.
Casey, who added the request to the grants he and Representatives Michael Morin and Robert Phillips submitted this year, said he believes the award will assist the museum in taking the next step toward finding the money needed to install the elevator.
“They need an elevator to help disabled veterans and disabled people who come to view the museum,” Casey said. “I think it a great museum and I hope this will help kick start the fund raising for them.”
The former First Universalist Church does not have an elevator for its three levels and that has been a problem for some visitors seeking to use the genealogical collections down one flight from the entrance way or the stairs to the museum.
Dusablon said on Friday the grant funding will help him run a fundraising campaign that will seek to collect the remaining donations needed to install the new handicapped access elevator.
“We already have $111,000 through a grant but now have to getting the matching funds,” Dusablon said.
The targeted $220,000 will allow the Genealogical Society to have an entrance lobby attached to the back entrance of the former church building and the elevator equipment on the inside of the structure accessing all three levels.
Roger Beaudry, AmericanFrench Genealogical Society treasurer, said the need for the elevator has been very clear when elderly veterans come to visit the upstairs museum and have to take breaks sitting in chairs at the various floors.
“That is really going to help because a lot of the World War II veterans are in their 90s and even the Vietnam veterans are getting on in age,” Beaudry said.
The new access will also benefit the genealogical library downstairs since many elderly residents stop in there to look up their family histo- ries, he noted.
“When you come in the door, you are at a landing on the stairs and have to go either up a flight of stairs, or down a flight of stairs to get into the building,” he said.
Although the $5,000 legislative grant cannot be used to pay for the building work itself, Dusablon said it can go toward the purchase of computer equipment and software used to run the fundraising campaign.
“It is seed money and it will help in lot of ways such as promotion and getting funds for campaign,” he said.
The Veterans Memorial Museum has an ever-growing collection of military artifacts and papers from the Revolutionary War right through the conflicts of today, Dusablon noted. The collection includes the uniform Theodore Francis Greene wore while fighting in the Spanish American War, uni- forms of soldiers fighting in World War II, decommissioned weaponry, and even a rare World War II paratrooper’s training helmet that had originally been designed as a football helmet.
The American-French Genealogical Society is likely to be a busy place this fall when a project Beaudry has been working on to remember the 78 soldiers with Woonsocket ties who were killed in World War I goes on display. The fallen soldiers were part of a group of more than 2,000 local soldiers who fought in the war.
Some of the lost soldiers had joined the fighting earlier than the rest the American forces going to the war ending at the 11th hour of the 11th day, of the 11th month of 1918 because of their ethnic background as French Canadians and who may have joined up on trips back to Canada.
“I have been collecting every piece of paper and photograph that I can find on these soldiers,” Beaudry said. He recently in fact received a photograph of William Jolicoeur, one of the World War I soldiers remembered at the Place Jolicoeur memorial off Cumberland Hill Road. The photograph was provided by Jolicoeur’s great niece, Anita Wilbur, he said.