President's Message

---

Dear Friends and Members of WAHS,

2025 was an exciting year for WAHS! We did five school visits for Syttende Mai, had summer "Open House" hours, and the 10th Annual Sweet Rides & Sweet Pies was a HUGE success! We surely hope you have been able to enjoy one or all of these events! 

The 2026 Syttende Mai week will be very busy! The Westby Elementary School Librarian, Ms. Peterson, and 4th-grade teacher, Mr. Henchen, at the Coon Valley Elementary School are once again helping us with our Grandparent of the Year nominations. Home schoolers will also be eligible to submit a nomination. Fourth graders study the history of Wisconsin, and we will present programs about the immigration of Norwegians to our area that fit beautifully with their classes. The Thoreson House Museum and Genealogy Center will be open on Syttende Mai Saturday, and we will sell lefse/pølse at our usual corner on Saturday and Sunday, May 16th and 17th. We are excited to celebrate our heritage during Syttende Mai week!

We welcomed TV celebrity DENNIS GAGE from My Classic Car! to our 10th annual event on Saturday, July 26, 2025. It was our best and biggest event yet! We had more than 300 cars and sold out of 600 pieces of pie with ice cream! We expect this year's 11th annual event on Saturday, July 25 will build on that success and bring us even more cars!

We will continue our summer Party on the Porch on the second Tuesday of the month in June, July, August, and September. We will have Summer Open House hours on two Sundays a month from 11 am - 2 pm. We have scheduled our Spring Cemetery Stone Cleaning Workshop for 10 am on Saturday, April 18 at the Coon Prairie Cemetery, and we have two Norwegian tour groups already scheduled to visit the museum this summer. 

WAHS is planning many events and activities to celebrate in 2026, so we hope you will check our Facebook page and read our newsletter for updates! To make things easier, we have added a dropdown to our ABOUT US tab above. If you click on it, you will see a menu item that will take you to an archive of several years of our newsletters.  You can see what we have done, what we are doing, and what is coming up – all in one place!

Thank you for your continued support of the Westby Area Historical Society. If you would like a tour of the museum or need help with your genealogy research, please contact us. We have so much to offer to our friends and members! 2025 was a wonderful year for WAHS, and we hope you can join us in 2026 for our meetings and activities!

Blaine Hedberg

WAHS President