If you're looking for something your entire family can do together, there's a museum that lets you take a walk through history.

In tonight's Wandering Wisconsin, Sarah Stokes shows us around an 11building museum in Ladysmith.

Sarah: If you come and visit the Rusk County Historical Museum, you're going to get a comprehensive picture of the past from the 2002 when the Ladysmith tornado destroyed the water tower all the way back to the 1800's.

If you take a tour with the museum's curator, Janet Platteter, you learn all kinds of fun facts.

"We were part of Chippewa County. We were the last county created in the state of Wisconsin. Before they created Rusk County, we were first named Rusk County for 4 years were called Gates County," she says.

The last little bit of gates county is in this building.

"All the furniture is original Gates County," she says.

She says politics prompted lawmakers to rename the county after Jeremiah Rusk.

"This is the desk Jeremiah Rusk used while he served as governor. He was a 3 term governor of Wisconsin."

And did you know Ladysmith is named after a prominent business man's wife?

"She never lived here," Platteter notes.

But now one of her sparkling dresses lives here, along with 9,000 other pieces of the past, like this huge razor collection from a local barber, dozens of logging artifacts, a tank, a log cabin built from trees the CCC planted and a room full of military memories, where Platteter and the other volunteers put the service of Rusk County veterans on display.

"It is very special to the families too," Platteter says. "Everything we have has been donated by people from the county so we identify each of those items who donated it and the relevance."

Platteter takes us inside the school building as she recalls, "this is the most fun that the kids have when they come to the Little Red School."

She's a retired teacher who enjoys seeing the little ones learn about their history.

"If we don't preserve it the children growing up are not going to know the area and I just think its so important that they know we were a logging area, a farming area and how the pioneers lived and how this area was developed," Platteter adds.

"There's a lot of history here," says Henry Golat. He has been the historical society's president for 22 years. He says the museum can bring generations together as they look at how far things like farm machinery have come.

Golat adds, "a lot of them come out to reminisce."

Or they come to learn from the past.

"Right now we're standing in the former Flambeau Mine Visitors Center," says the historical society's youngest member, Alan Christanson. He adds, knowing recent history like the Flambeau Mine will help the next generation make decisions for the future.

Alan Christianson says, "you always have to take a little time to look back at where you came from."

Sarah: The museum is always open on the weekends in the summertime from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. or you can make an appointment if you want to visit during the week and admission is free.

The museum is located on the rusk county fairgrounds in Ladysmith. To learn more, click here for the museum's website.