1The newest exhibit at the Jefferson County Historical Museum in Port Townsend puts you in the shoes of today’s farmers, while another display looks into the lives of yesterday’s working women.

Near the front of the museum, the “Deep Roots” exhibit features a short movie starring the Jefferson County farmers of the present, the recent past and possibly the future.

In it, Jefferson County Commissioner Phil Johnson recalls growing up on a Port Townsend farm, where he loved to grow vegetables.

And Steven Habersetzer, the product of a dairy operation who now runs the Oats Planter Farm, talks about leaving home at 18, then returning to become a grower again.

“Farming is in me,” he said. “Farming is where I feel like I really contribute to my community.”

The exhibit, which will stay up through 2009, is a collaboration of the Jefferson Land Trust, Washington State University Extension and Jefferson Landworks and grew out of oral histories gathered at the Jefferson County Fair.

Chimacum Valley farmer Griffin Short sums up the concern many older farmers share.

“Conserving the land isn’t the same as farming it,” he said in the movie. “For that you need farmers, and in Jefferson County, they are retiring faster than they’re being replaced.”

The movie offers hope, though, by showing the next generation of growers, many of whom are raising organic crops.

Keith Kisler appears on screen holding his baby son, Coulter, talking about growing a family, blueberries and grain on the Finnriver Farm, and Karyn Williams tells a little about her life on the Red Dog Farm.

“There is so much to do . . . it’s never going to get done,” Williams said.

But then, she adds, farmers like her are by nature ambitious and optimistic, so they keep growing.

When asked which is the most popular exhibit at the museum, receptionist Diane Allen didn’t hesitate to give directions to the old jail downstairs.

“It’s pretty horrible; there’s an isolation cell with manacles,” she said.

On the way down, however, you’ll find something else that’s equally thought-provoking.

“Sin at Sea Level” is a permanent exhibit about prostitution in so-called “bloody Townsend,” a place where saloons and “houses of ill repute” proliferated during the late 19th century.

There’s a list of slang words for prostitute that could curl your hair. And when you read the labels beside the images of the “fallen women,” you’ll gain some insight into what lay behind those smiles and petticoats.

“Most prostitutes came from backgrounds that had accustomed them to hard work, few comforts and futures that promised to remain the same from generation to generation,” one label reads.

“By comparison, prostitution could pay well, promised freedom and must have seemed tempting to desperate young women . . . most probably saw prostitution as a temporary solution to an immediate economic predicament. Like the men, they were here wagering body and soul for better lives.”

Another label notes that many prostitutes had husbands but too often found themselves married to “unskilled laborers or criminals” who “procured customers for their wives,” then took and spent the income.

“Despite the gloomy outlook,” the label continues, “women accepted husbands from this sorry assortment. The desire for human companionship and comfort surely ran as high for them as for any other people.”

Bill Tennent, executive director of the Jefferson County Historical Society, said the “Sin” exhibit is meant to be different from others about prostitution.

While some portrayals paint sex work as colorful and rollicking, this one provides a starker view, Tennent said.

Like “Deep Roots,” it took shape at the hands of museum designer Becky Schurmann.

New exhibits in March

A new exhibit, “First Europeans,” will open in March, Tennent added.

Also designed by Schurmann, it will provide a look inside the lives of the Spanish and English explorers as they first encountered the North Olympic Peninsula.

Also opening next month: a celebration of comic books in the museum’s Collector’s Corner.

On March 6 at 6:30 p.m. Tennent will give a lecture, “Superman and the History of American Comic Books,” in the Port Townsend City Council Chambers, which share the museum building. Admission is by donation.

The Jefferson County Historical Society, with Tennent as its sole full-time staff member, six part-timer staffers and 270 volunteers, is looking forward to a major makeover of the museum. Thanks to a $200,000 state grant, new exhibits will be built around two themes.

The first is “We Came with Dreams,” and “it will deal with all of the reasons people have come to Jefferson County, from the Native Americans all the way to the retirees,” Tennent said.

Another gallery’s theme will be “the sea around us,” to show how water travel, water sports and shipping connect people, from loggers who harvest lumber for shipbuilding to dairymen who send their products out on boats from Port Townsend.

These new exhibits won’t be finished until 2012, Tennent said, but the museum is closer to installing an orientation theater, where visitors can watch a movie about the displays they’re about to see. That will be finished by the end of this year, he said.

Since the museum and the City Council share the building, Tennent is fond of describing it this way: “People go upstairs to the City Council Chambers to learn about the future of the town. They come downstairs to learn about the past.”

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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.