Mystery Artifact Returns!

Hello to all our faithful followers and Happy New Year!  We hope you had a lovely winter break and stayed safe through all the bouts of bad weather.  As many of you know, the Museum of the Grand Prairie is closed throughout January and February for maintenance and exhibit building, and we stay very busy during this time!  We will have many exciting new changes to show off when we reopen in March. 

The biggest changes are happening in the Museum's main gallery.  We have been clearing out and tearing down exhibit elements from our Prairie Stories exhibit, and the space looks very different now that artifacts have been safely removed and the platforms and dividers torn out!  We are currently processing all the artifacts to make sure everything is accounted for and in good condition before we place it in storage.

Many familiar Prairie Stories artifacts will return in our new exhibit which will open in March 2015, and some will be incorporated into our 2014 temporary exhibit Home Grown:  Gardening Yesterday and Today opening in March of this year.  Keep watching this space, as we'll continue to post behind-the-scenes information with progress on the new exhibits.

In the meanwhile, we'll return to weekly Mystery Artifact posts.  Here is this week's object:

It is an iron object, with a hollowed-out conical space in one end (here's a hint:  this space is meant to hold a wooden handle).  The other end is flattened, with a hook that appears at the top in this picture.  As you can see from the ruler, the artifact is slightly more than a foot long.

What is this item?  What was it used for?  Take your best guess in the comments section below or on Facebook, and we'll post the answer on Friday!