Museum Board and Community

Community members socializing inside the museum

For donating the building and postponing rent for the new iteration of the Scotts Run Museum and Trail, providing coffee and amazing snacks, fresh fruit, cheese and hospitality every Saturday for the locals and visitors that make the museum a real community center, we thank Executive Director Mary Jane Coulter. She has an amazing story herself and has become a great friend and inspiration to design students.

We want to thank President of the Board, Sara Boyd Little, who at 95 is still an often-booked singer with the Flying Colors, having performed publicly since high school when she first sang for President Roosevelt and had a brief radio singing segment with two of her sisters in Morgantown. She worked for the Pentagon and met General Macarthur during World War II, and for the Scotts Run Settlement House until she was 88. She recently visited Uganda and is now visiting the Grand Canyon, teaching everyone about nutrition and African American History. She is a champion for social justice, and a model for students and everyone of forgiveness and positive thinking.

We would like to thank Louis Birurakis and his children for helping out with the museum. Lou is the Historian for the area and has devoted countless hours to documenting the history of each of the communities from microfilm of early newspaper articles. He worked for WVU football and basketball games until age 89, donating his salary to the Scotts Run Park and Recreation, Inc., and providing every WVU design class with a history of the area, with special stories about the Greek community of Liberty. Lou is also the oldest WVU Alumni football player and the first to letter 4 years.

Al Anderson, born in Osage, a cobbler now in his 80s and singer with the Fabians in the late 50s, Billy Ward and the Dominos in the 1960s and continuing with the Flying Colors, Al and the Rock and Soul Revue through today, is the unofficial Mayor of Osage, our expert on the Civil Rights Movement, and responsible for bringing the PSD to the Scotts Run Area. His story has been featured in Goldenseal Magazine and he has been part of the Museum in this iteration and the earlier ones. He also leads the singing slate at the September Street Fair.

From these special people and Patty Thomas, Dolly King, Nancy Coles, Donna Woydak, John Propst, George Sarris, John Fiorini, Norman Julian, and many others, we see history kept alive in Saturday and Tuesday meetings where everyone receives a warm welcome and a dose of laughter as stories fly from visitors and residents alike in the history not captured in official records, but carrying the culture and fabric that made the towns resilient and caring for one another across race and ethnicity in ways we could use more of today.