Vicki Connor is looking at a poster in the back room of the Ryan House. It’s a caricature of one of Sumner’s old and long passed citizens, a salesman with a head three times the size of his body, his face stuck in a smile forever.

“The older women on the board, from my early days with the Society, did not want this poster up as part of the collection,” Connor said. “They just didn’t see it as a historical item, because they knew him.”

It might be true that history is in the unchangeable past, but it doesn’t make it any easier to understand. After all, the past is just life that’s already happened, and life is a mess of clothing, newspaper clippings, letters, furniture and bills that all, somehow, add up to the faint echoes of meaning. If the historian has one overarching purpose, it’s to turn chaos into order; to transform disparate details into a narrative that can be understood by the layman.

That’s the challenge facing Connor and the other volunteers for Sumner’s historical museum, the Ryan House. Though the museum has housed its late 19th/early 20th century collection for more than 30 years, the Sumner Historical Society is trying to bring it an order that will last into the future.

“The goal is to make it so I don’t just know where everything is; anyone will be able to find what they’re looking for,” Connor said.

They have made headway in many respects: document archives are slowly becoming more organized, upstairs rooms are no longer piled high with mannequins, and clothing collections have been streamlined. Hard to care for items like fur coats have been completely thrown out.

“They’re just a difficult item to handle,” Connor said. “Between brushing, bugs and keeping the right temperature, they’re more trouble than they’re worth. And they aren’t that significant of an item to Sumner. They were more significant on the East Coast because it gets cold, but out here they were more of a status symbol.”

She seemed relieved to be able to get rid of the mink, the costumes that never quite fit in with the museum’s turn-of-the-century theme, and other non-Sumner clothing.

“I have spent fifteen years trying to go through every item and I’m not sure I’ve even gotten through every item,” Connor said.

Then there are the items that couldn’t and shouldn’t be relinquished, Connor said, items like the first Daffodil Festival coronation robe.

“That’s a clothing item that is definitely part of our history,” she said. “We couldn’t part with that.”

Connor has been a museum professional since she began with the Historical Society in the ’70s, and an enthusiast since she was a young girl in Wenatchee. She jokingly recalled her disdain for kids who didn’t understand how cool museums were. It’s safe to say she has experience in archiving historical materials.

Yet Ryan House shows the telltale signs of the desperate and frustrating midpoint that occurs in every drastic clean up. Boxes full of newspaper clippings, old and recent alike, took up every seat and surface of the dining room.

The midpoint is where Connor describes the Ryan House. In the middle of reorganizing. In the middle of separating from the city’s phone system. In the middle of developing a website.

2011-2012 is and will continue to be a midpoint operating period for the Historical Society as its volunteers bring the Ryan House to order. The museum will still be open to the public in November and December, followed by April to August and the first Wednesday of every month year-round, but the focus will be on improving the archive system until the job is complete. Then, museum-goers can have a semblance of a structured narrative to Sumner’s history.

Not that the narrative of history is always agreed upon.

Connor recalled the once-unwanted caricature. A past Historical Society board of directors didn’t want the picture placed because it wasn’t history; it was a kitschy gift given to a friend with a name and a life that felt like a recent memory. More than a generation later, Connor doesn’t doubt the historical value of the poster, but it makes her think.

“You have to wonder what we have that will make it into museums a hundred years from now,” she said.

The Sumner Historical Society can be reached at 253-299-5780. The Ryan House is located at 1228 Main Street.