The Kehret Chapel, Excelsior School house and other buildings at the Mower County Historical Society are getting facelifts to help make them more historically accurate.

The Mower County Historical Society started restoring parts of the Kehret Chapel, the 146-year-old Excelsior School house and multiple other buildings recently.

A $10,000 donation was given to the historical society to repair the chapel, prevent it from flooding and to reshingle the roof.

The historical society is also restoring the schoolhouse to make it more historically accurate to how it looked when it was built in 1870 near Lyle, according to Executive Director John Haymond.

“We’ve been wanting to do this for quite a while,” he said.

The school was eventually moved to historical society on the Mower County Fairgrounds.

Work will include taking out the old siding, replacing it with cedar siding and redoing the window shutters.

The work should be done in time for the 2016 Mower County Fair Aug. 9-14, when more than 20,000 people typically visit the grounds and check out Mower’s history, according to Haymond.

“The Historical Societies mission … is quite simply to identify, protect, preserve and disseminate Mower County’s history,” Haymond said.

Currently, the historical society has 16 historical buildings on site, and a few of these buildings are going to be restored or are currently in the process of restoration. These also include the train depot, the Hormel building and the headquarters building.

For the first time ever, the train depot is going to be professionally painted. After the fair week in August, the Historical home is also going to be doing some protective work on the headquarters building.

None of this would have been possible without appropriations from the Mower County Commission, according to Haymond.