Neenah's Historical Society Isn't Waiting for You at the Museum Anymore
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Walk into Lion's Tail Brewing Co. on a Monday evening this fall and you might expect the usual: a rotating tap list, a few regulars at the bar, maybe a trivia night. On August 24, what you'd have found instead was a crowd gathered near the back of the taproom listening to a local historian work through a story about Neenah's past that had nothing to do with beer at all.
That's not an accident, and it's not a one-off. The Neenah Historical Society has spent the past year moving its programming out of its own building and into the places residents already go. The Octagon House on Smith Street is still there, still open four days a week, but if you've been waiting for a reason to plan a special trip to learn something about this town, the Society has quietly stopped waiting with you. It's showing up at the brewery. It's showing up at the library. This past August, it showed up at the cemetery.
Lion's Tail Brewing Co. sits at 116 South Commercial Street, next to Neenah's Clocktower downtown, inside a building that used to be a bank. Alex and Kristin Wenzel opened the brewery there in November 2015, and the space has kept the bones of its old life: the kind of restored, high-ceilinged interior that makes you look twice at the architecture before you look at the tap list. It's an appropriate backdrop for a history talk, whether or not that was the original plan.
The series itself is called Stumbling Through History, and it started last year as an informal companion to the Society's usual programming, a chance to hear about Neenah's early years without the structure of a guided museum tour. This year the format returns with a sharper focus: instead of general local history, each session digs into the stories that made the news and gossip columns over the decades, the kind of material that doesn't usually make it into a formal exhibit placard. The series runs three times this fall, on August 24, September 21, and October 19, at Lion's Tail. If you missed the first one, you've still got two chances left, and a portion of the proceeds goes back to support the Historical Society directly.
It's a small thing, but it says something about how the Society is thinking about its own audience. A museum with four open windows a week competes with everyone's schedule. A brewery on a Monday night doesn't have to compete with anything. You were already planning to be there.
While the brewery series is new, the Society's bigger project this year has been quietly running at its own building since April 2025: Growing Up Neenah, An All-American Childhood. It's set to close this November, which puts its final months squarely in the fall calendar alongside everything else.
What makes the exhibit worth mentioning here isn't the concept, plenty of historical societies build a childhood-nostalgia show, it's the specificity of what counts as uniquely Neenah. The exhibit centers on the Rocket Slide at Riverside Park, the Brigade and Camp Onaway tradition, the now-retired Santa Float, and the Neenah Pool, all local touchstones that don't mean anything outside this city and mean quite a lot inside it. If you grew up here, or you're raising kids who are growing up here now, these are the landmarks that show up in family photos whether anyone planned it that way.
The Octagon House sits within walking distance of downtown Neenah, Arrowhead Park, the Loop the Lake Trail, and The Plaza, which means a stop at the exhibit fits naturally into a Saturday that already includes a walk along the water. It's open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., a narrow window that rewards planning if you want to see it before it closes.
The pattern doesn't stop at a brewery and a museum. On November 19, the Society brings a different kind of program to the Neenah Public Library: a lighter, more theatrical look at the city's history framed around the same instinct that made Bridgerton popular, gossip, scandal, and social maneuvering, except all of it actually happened here. It's free and open to the public, which fits the Society's broader approach this year: lower the barrier to entry, meet people where they already show up, and let the history do the rest.
Earlier in August, that same instinct showed up somewhere less expected. The Society partnered with the Daughters of the American Revolution for a cemetery walk honoring America's 250th anniversary, featuring the stories of four Neenah residents connected to Revolutionary War patriots: Letta French, Frank Miller, John Pinkerton, and Mary Howden. That event already happened this year, but it's worth mentioning because it fits the same shape as everything else on this list. None of these programs asked you to carve out a special afternoon for local history. They asked you to notice that local history had shown up somewhere you were already headed.
Here's the remaining calendar, in order:
None of it requires advance tickets or a special trip across town. That's the point.
The Society recently named Miranda Ridener, who had been serving as museum coordinator since April 2024, as its new executive director. Leadership transitions at small nonprofits don't usually make for interesting reading, but this one lines up with a real change in how the organization operates. A history museum that depends on scheduled visits during a handful of weekly hours will always be competing with everyone's calendar. A history program embedded in a brewery's Monday night, a library's Thursday evening, or a cemetery walk built around a national anniversary doesn't have to win that competition. It just has to exist in a place people were already going.
For a city the size of Neenah, that's a meaningful strategic bet. It treats local history less like a destination and more like something woven into the ordinary rhythm of downtown, the same rhythm that already includes a Friday concert at Shattuck Park or a Saturday morning at the farmers market. The story of Neenah stops being something you have to seek out and becomes something you run into.
If you've lived here long enough to remember the Rocket Slide before it showed up in an exhibit, or you've walked past the Clocktower a hundred times without knowing what used to sit inside that brewery's walls, this fall gives you an easy way to close that gap without treating it like an errand.
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