January is always a good time for looking back and looking forward. Rather than recreate a summary of the year, here is a copy of our end-of-year letter that went out last month. If you didn’t receive one in the mail but would like to in coming years, give us a call and leave your name and address; we will gladly add you to our mailing list!

Numbers are also a big deal for institutions like ours. We had 4441 visitors through our doors in 2024 — very close to the same number as 2023 (4489). It is interesting to note that while we had about 400 visitors in one day for the eclipse in April this year, we had exactly 400 fewer visitors during the Christmas Country Church Tour (650 as opposed to 1050). We don’t have people sign our guest book during the church tour (it would cause too much of a backup, so we just use a clicker to keep count as best we can), so we don’t know where everyone was from during those two days. However, going through the guest book, I can’t add any other states to the map I did back in October. Here is is again, though, showing what states we had visitors from in 2024.

As far as visitors go, we not only look at who comes through our door, but also those who visit our website. According to those statistics, we had 62,605 visitors to our website with 121,669 total views. Of particular note, these visitors came from 121 different countries! Here are the top ones:

Our Facebook visitors were harder to track in 2024 as we lost access to our page late August and ended up creating a new one in September. We’re up to 408 followers – quite a few shy of the 2.5K we had with the old one. If you aren’t following our new page yet, now is a great time to do so!

That brings us to the looking forward part of this post. Once the trees come down next week, we will start work on our new displays on the 1925 Tri-State Tornado and an embroidery exhibit from the St. Louis and Southern Illinois members of the Embroiders Guild of America.

Work just got underway planning this years’ Immigration Conference. More information about that will be coming in the next couple of weeks.

We have lots of projects planned for the coming year! Stay tuned to our website and Facebook page for updates along the way, and, if you walk through our door, be sure to sign our guest book and let us know where you are from :).

See you soon!