The Mining and Rollo Jamison Museum was established in 1964 to preserve the mining history of Platteville. Over the years, the museum has collected many different items that represent Platteville’s history. Some of the artifacts that the museum has on display include Victorian clothes, old carriages and a mining locomotive from 1931. 

The museum hosts several cleaning projects throughout the year. While each project is different, volunteers are encouraged to come in and help every time. These projects can consist of cleaning and organizing to helping dispose items that the museum no longer uses.

“[Sigma Pi members] have helped us before. Every time we have a cleanup day, we have different projects. The project we were working on was cleaning the attic,” collections manager Tracey Roberts said. 

During the attic project, Sigma Pi volunteers moved old and broken-down cases that needed to be thrown away, disposed of old signage that had been stored in the attic and helped lift old furniture out to the collections area. 

Roberts went on to explain that over the past decade, people have just been throwing things up into the attic that do not belong in the museum’s collection. These include broken cases, broken chairs and miscellaneous junk. The museum attic also suffered water damage and destruction from a previous bat infestation. When this project came up, the museum contacted the men of Sigma Pi to help them. 

“We really enjoyed [cleaning the museum] the first time around so we asked to set up another time to go. Not only does this opportunity log us quite a few [community] service hours at once, [but] we also really enjoy helping out the museum,” sophomore civil engineering major Tyler Niemuth said. 

Sigma Pi members helped the museum with the attic and were able to see artifacts that are not open to the general public.

“The most interesting thing I found while I was cleaning was definitely an old French [World War I] helmet. I don’t really know how old it is, but it is pretty cool,” Niemuth said.