The Sedona Historical Society announced its annual fundraising campaign for the first time with a comprehensive plan to improve all of its four sites.

The total fundraising goal is $40,000.

According to a letter the historical society sent out on Nov. 17, the total goal includes $5,000 for both Cook’s Cedar Glade and Schuerman Red Rock cemeteries to have new permanent signage of the cemeteries’ histories and stories about prominent citizens interred in each site; $15,000 for the Sedona Heritage Museum in Uptown for new exhibit creation and furniture; and $20,000 is to improve the Schuerman Homestead House on Upper Red Rock Loop Road, its outdoor and indoor signage, cutouts and graphic design to increase education about the Arizona wine industry.

“What we’re doing is, probably for the first time in our institution’s history, we’re looking holistically at all four of our sites,” Sedona Historical Society Executive Director Nate Meyers said, “so [the] Cook’s Cedar Glade Cemetery, Schuerman Red Rock Cemetery andthe Schuerman Homestead House, and saying, ‘what are the stories we’re trying to tell across these sites, and how can we do it effectively?’”

A lot of the work at the cemeteries will be about beautifying the grounds and creating signs to tell the stories of the pioneers buried there, said Kathy Levin, a historical society trustee.

Schuerman Homestead

The Schuerman Homestead House in particular, Meyers said, has a lot of educational opportunities for visitors and locals alike.
“The reason the site’s important, and the reason it landed on the National Register of Historic Places, is that it’s the birthplace of the Arizona wine industry,” he said. “I think people come here knowing that Sedona is wine country.

“People, I don’t think, realize that that industry started right here, right at that property, right off Loy Lane and the Upper [Red Rock] Loop Road.”

Levin said the house is old — over 120 years — and prone to having rodents and other pests, so a lot of the work to be done it creating signage and windows to view recreated images of time inside.

So, work needs to be done to tell the story — such as rodent-proof exhibits that can be viewed from the windows. This includes scenes like the Schuermans in a historically-accurate kitchen with rodent-proof artifacts.

The Schuermans founded the first winery in the state and sold wine locally and across the state including after Arizona’s alcohol prohibition began in 1915, several years before Prohibition was imposed nationwide with the 18th Amendment in 1919.

Levin said the goal is to tell all the story of the house, including the Homestead Act, the Loy family, the birth of the wine industry there and the building’s status in the National Register of Historic Places.

Heinrich “Henry” Schuerman was deeded the land in the 1880s. His granddaughter Frieda Schuerman, who was raised in the house, married Myron Loy and moved into the house in 1928, according to a sign currently at the house.

She deeded the house to the Sedona Historical Society in January 2019.

“Another exterior sign will talk about the Red Rock Ditch and irrigation,” Levin said. The ditch that provided water for the crops and grape vines in Sedona still provides much water to residents in the area, she said.

Long-term goals include planting some of the original types of wine grapevines near the house, including the Zinfandel variant now grown in Wilcox from strands of the original Schuerman vines.

Sedona Heritage Museum

The museum has rotating displays, every few months showing a new story.

“There’s a cost to that,” Meyers said. “There’s a cost to improving our display cases and getting new equipment to display things. Stuff people don’t even think about, like how do we mount an artifact for display? Well, there’s mounting equipment [that we need to buy].”

Each year, the historical society looks through its exhibits and decides where it wants to head for the next year, and puts together a campaign surrounding the planned exhibits.

“Last year, we raised money for some software upgrades, for hardware upgrades,” Meyers said. “So those donations … allowed us to get, for instance, the digital microphone reader that we’ve talked about and to put the Agents of Discovery app in place.”

The microphone reader allows people to listen to descriptions of the exhibits they’re looking at as they walk through the different rooms in the museum.

Meyers said there’s been over 1,000 plays of the app since they instituted it earlier this year.

The overall goal last year was $30,000 for the software and hardware upgrades at the museum.

“We fell just short, but we did raise enough that we were able to implement the software,” Meyers said.

He said someone who’d been involved with the museum much longer than Meyers’ four-year tenure said it was the museum’s most successful fundraising campaign, and he hopes to break last year’s record this year.

Donate

Those wanting to donate have several options.

“You can send us a check,” Meyers said. “You can come in person here with cash, card or check. You can go to our website, sedonamuseum.org, and click … the ‘get involved’ button. And there’s a ‘donate’ button there.”