BOWLING GREEN – Military uniforms, projected films and photographs from the ’30s and ’40s transport visitors to another time as they enter the Wood County Museum.
Originally built in 1868, the museum stands as the “recognized guardian” of Wood County’s past since 1975, when it was officially deemed a museum after being decommissioned as an infirmary.
About every two years the historical building takes on another time period or theme, as the staff prepare different programs or exhibits. Right now, the exhibit on display is called We’ll Meet Again: Remembering World War II, but the road to remembering has been a bit more complicated for this one.
“When the museum does a larger exhibit, we usually write a grant to Ohio Humanities to help with paying for the exhibit,” said Annette Wells, who directs the Wood County Museum. “It usually covers about half [of the expenses], and then we basically come up with the other half.
“A whole new exhibit for us would usually cost maybe 40 to $50,000.”
Towards the end of last year, Ohio Humanities, a nonprofit that supports the Ohio stories with grants and programs, awarded the Wood County Museum with a grant. The initial ask from the museum was for about $20,000.
With expected cuts from the Trump administration and an anticipated government shutdown at the beginning of 2025, Ohio Humanities only awarded the museum with $16,000.
“And then, life changed in 2025,” said David Merkowitz, director of grants, programs and operations for Ohio Humanities.
“Either April 2 or April 3, we got a letter, along with essentially all other NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] grantees across the country, that they had canceled our grants immediately and completely,” he said.
Any given year, Ohio Humanities receives somewhere between $300,000-$500,000 from NEH, but Ohio Humanities has not received that money.
“We really don’t know what’s going on,” Merkowitz said.
Because of the absence of funds, Ohio Humanities has let a number of grants awarded at the end of 2024 into 2025 go unfulfilled, including the Wood County Museum’s WWII exhibition.
“Then they said, ‘We’re sorry, we did award you. We accepted your proposal but we don’t have the money because it got cut away from us.’ Even though it was approved by Congress, it got cut,” Wells said, remembering the moment she was told the museum might be on the hook for $16,000.
But the funding structure from NEH to Ohio Humanities is rippling through the state’s humanities organizations.
“We had awarded 10 grants we were unable to follow through with,” Merkowitz said, acknowledging that generally they would have awarded 40-50 grants by now.
Instead, Ohio Humanities has been focusing on alternative operations and keeping what programs they can.
But much of this starts with the NEH, created with the blessing of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 through the signing of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act.
Twelve points in Section 2 of the Act make clear the importance of arts and humanities in perpetuating democracy, world leadership for the United States and for the education and benefit of “the people of the United States.”
In light of the stated benefits from the 1965 law, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and NEH were founded and funded.
More recently, “They [Congress] essentially passed a bill that funded everything at 2024 levels, which meant that NEH should have been funded,” Merkowitz said, but, unfortunately, Ohio Humanities did not receive the funding they generally have come to expect through NEH.
The defunding of NEH and its inability to fulfill already awarded grants has led to lawsuits against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and NEH, most notably a class action lawsuit led by three organizations: American Historical Association (AHA), the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
On the ACLS’s website, the organization explained the lawsuit that was filed on May 1.
“The NEH’s recent actions and the administration’s refusal to distribute funds appropriated by Congress violate the law in multiple ways: They fail to provide reasoning for the NEH’s actions; disregard the constitutional separation of powers; and, by refusing to spend appropriations as legally required, ignore the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.”
A version of the same statement is available on the other two organizations’ websites, as well.
In the meantime, out in Bowling Green and amidst the cornfields, the Wood County Museum needed help to complete their exhibit.
“So we went to the Wood County commissioners and told them the situation, and they said that they would loan us the $16,000,” said Wells.
The commissioners have not yet decided whether the $16,000 the museum received will be a gift or a loan.
“We’re disappointed that they [Ohio Humanities] made a commitment to the Historical Museum and then were not able to follow through with that,” said Doris Herringshaw, Wood County commissioner. “It makes it tough for us because we did not plan just to spend that extra $16,000 on the museum.
“It just wasn’t part of the budget…and there’s a lot of other precedents it might set if we do just give it as a gift. So, there are just lots of questions we have to ask before we actually commit to it.”
In light of these realities, Wells has chosen to treat the money as a loan, even if the money ends up being gifted.
“So, we’re going to try and recoup some of those funds from the events that the museum does during the year,” Wells noted.
The museum does a yearly auction they hope will bring in a little more than usual, and they will be pushing their monthly Music at the Museum events and other paid activities at the museum.
“We’re hoping, but also we might be able to pull a little bit out of our endowment that we have, as well, to help to cover some of those costs.”
Although most nonprofit structures have endowments, part of those funds work in perpetuity, accruing interest, so pulling too much from the endowment could have negative consequences for the museum in the future.
But going forward, the museum is unsure if it will be able to meet its general rotation of one main exhibit switched out every two years. “In other words, the exhibit might be up for longer. I’m not sure, either that or we might take it down, but we might not be able to replace it with anything at the end of 2026,” Wells said.
Ohio Humanities, like the museum, has received some unanticipated funds to cover some of the money that did not trickle down from NEH. The Mellon Foundation has given each state’s humanities council $200,000 to help keep those organizations afloat, and, so far, the museum and Ohio Humanities said they haven’t had to lay-off anyone. But the National Endowment for the Humanities has had 65 percent of their employees fired by DOGE.
With major cuts being made on the federal level, Herringshaw said, “We’re keeping an eye on everything,” and that commissioners were trying to manage the county as responsibly as possible so any cuts wouldn’t be felt by residents.
“The bottom line is that we get what we get, and we have to live within our budget.”
