Har-Ber Village Museum’s story of resilience & recovery amidst severe weather
GROVE, Okla. — An area attraction has been through Mother Nature’s ringer over the last year.
But workers are hoping to turn those negatives into positives.
The phrase, “if it wasn’t for bad luck, they wouldn’t have any at all” is a good description of 2023 at Har-Ber Village Museum in Grove, Oklahoma.
It all started on Father’s Day when 90-plus-mile-an-hour straight-line winds struck the attraction, closing it to the public for five weeks.
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“It took down about twenty-two trees, going through several buildings, we have seventy-one buildings on the property, and about nine of those, nine to ten of those were damaged,” said Nicole Reynolds, Executive Director, Har-ber Village Museum.
A few weeks ago the last of those structures that were damaged were repaired and reopened.
Then again on Labor Day, the facility, created by Jones Truck Line founders Harvey and Bernice Jones got hit by another storm.
“The second one thankfully it was only about two days of loss of business and we had about eighteen trees come down, it came down through the entrance, it had taken down the electricity polls in the local area and so we had to cut the way in for the electric company to come in and be able to do repairs that they needed to do,” said Reynolds.
In between those two storms was a freak accident that lead to the closure of the cafe.
“And then on July 29th last year, there was a vehicle fire outside of our cafe which caught the cafe on fire and so the restaurant was burned and it’s still under renovation uh we have about an eight-week time frame before that reopens,” said Reynolds.
Reynolds says it will be a long time before all the debris is gone, even requiring an upcoming controlled burn to get rid of most of it, but she says not all of it will go up in flames.
“We had beautiful hundred-year-old red oaks, white oaks, we have walnut trees so we’ve taken primary logs for those and we’re going to be reusing those, some of them we’ve already planked down and used as benches, others will be used to redo buildings,” said Reynolds.
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