Saline County Museum Is Open For 2026 Season

It's that time of year again. The Saline County Museum will be open for the summer season beginning Sunday, May 3, according to social media posts.

 

The museum (located in south Dorchester) will be open every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday from 1 to 4 p.m. 

 

Admission to the museum and its numerous buildings is free, although donations are welcome. 

For those who don't know, the museum's roots can be traced back to the 1950s, when Dorchester's own Rosa Dusanek had a dream of building a Saline County museum to house the history of our area's people. 

Here's how it went down:

In 1957, the Saline County Historical Society was established. In 1960, the Saline County commissioners gave the society a one-tenth mill levy. The museum's first building -- the teal colored structure you see from Hwy. 33 -- was built in 1964.

Today there are more than a dozen buildings.

1. The Kaspar Memorial Building (white and blue building near Washington Ave.) features antiques automobiles and farm equipment.
   
   
2. The Research Building (gray and red building near Hwy 33) now features a old-fashioned General Mercantile Store as it would have appeared in the early 1900-1920s.
   
   
3. The Weidner Building contains turn-of-the century horse equipment, wagons, and old-time printing presses.
   
   
4.  The Chapel was refurbished in 2025 and contains “In Loving Memory” funeral displays, an altar and wedding dresses and suits. A nearby memorial pays tribute to Dorchester's Charlie Havlat, the last American killed in the European Theater at the end of WWII. 
   
   
5. The Memorial Building has an 1800s bedroom, a 1950s living room, a parlor and an old-fashioned kitchen. There is a textile room, dentist office, doctor’s office and a beauty shop. It was recently upgraded to include air conditioning, we're told.
    
6. The Machinery Building has implements from the past centuries. In recent years, it has been re-organized with items labeled to explain how old-timer equipment was used.
   
   
7. The Voting Building is original. This building was only used for voting.
   
   
8. The Buckingham School is a one-room country school from 1871. It is a building where present day children can go to school to see how their great grandparents were educated. 
   
   
9. The Burden Home belonged to the first black homesteader in Saline County. Seven children were born and raised in this tiny two-room home, built just after the Civil War.
   
   
10. The Cizek log cabin, which dates back to 1866, is in the white building north of the Burden home, along with a large, fascinating collection of barbed wire and other items.
    
    
11. The Dorchester Railroad Depot houses fascinating train and railroad-related memorabilia, giving visitors a look at how Americans traveled to distant locations before planes and modern reliable automobiles.
    
    
12. The Main Building contains a wide variety of items, from John Palky's pre-historic tool collection, to military displays, to items showcasing Pleasant Hill's history.
    
    
13. And the Plato Post Office building is a traveling post office, a tiny building that moved from farm to farm.

The Saline County Museum is operated strictly by volunteers. The Saline County Historical Society Board consists of several individuals who meet quarterly. And the museum volunteers say they are working on new displays.