Paul Bickford
Northern News Services

Fort Smith (Aug 15/05) - Treasures are waiting to be found at Fort Smith's Northern Life Museum.

Curator Kevin Brunt believes something extraordinary will turn up during the ongoing inventory of the museum's collection.

Melanie Jewell, a summer worker at Fort Smith's Northern Life Museum, holds an old violin, which caused a brief stir when museum workers thought it might be a Stradivarius.

"I would be shocked if we didn't find something," Brunt says. "There's usually something very special."

At Northern Life Museum, storage sheds are full of shelves crammed with an amazing array of items.

"There's so much piled on each of these shelves it's impossible to really see what's in there," Brunt says. In late winter, staff at the museum thought they had a major find after tourists pointed out an old fiddle in the sheds.

"I thought for a moment there we had a Stradivarius, but it wasn't," Brunt recalls. "It was a copy."

A label inside the violin reads "Antonius Stradivarius", but a closer look revealed "A copy of" in smaller print above the name.

Brunt has also heard stories of a samurai's armour and weapon at the museum.

"I've never seen it," he says, noting there is nothing about the items in the museum's records.

Aside from possible treasures, there is just the simply puzzling.

Brunt has a box of about 100 broken bits of some kind of black material, but has no idea what it is.

"It's not rock," he says. "It looks definitely like it's processed. I thought it was like caulking material almost."

The material - which is shiny on the inside and doesn't melt, just roasts - is not included in the museum's records.

One of the people helping with the inventory is summer worker Melanie Jewell.

Jewell points to out-of-date fashions - old vests that tour guides used to wear - as one of the strangest things she has seen so far. "It's like all plaid from the '70s."

The inventory will determine how many artifacts are in the collection, where they are and their value to the museum.

It is estimated the museum has between 13,000-15,000 items, and so far about 3,000 have been inventoried.