The future of Museum L-A starts tonight.

At 6:30 p.m., museum planners and architects contracted by Museum L-A will present concepts for a new facility, a growing necessity for the growing museum because of redevelopment in its current home, the Bates Mill. (The Museum is now housed just above Da Vinci’s restaurant.)

As ties to L-A’s past start to fray, preserving its history becomes more critical. The sites, sights and sounds symbolizing the Twin Cities cannot survive the gradual erosion of time, as the changing community forces stalwart icons – such as the Libbey Mill, for example – to be destroyed in the name of progress.

Museum L-A can become an unbreakable link to L-A’s past, both through its collection and display of artifacts, but also its community engagement, like the Millworker Reunion and recent oral history project. Lewiston-Auburn needs organizations devoted to its roots, especially ones that can act as more than mere storehouses of information.

Bolstering the future of Museum L-A is, on its own, a historical event for Lewiston-Auburn, because if a community sheds its history, it loses knowledge of whence it came.

And vast wisdom, in helping it toward where it’s going.