The Museum's Two-Fold Mission
Educational Mission
The Crandall Historical Printing Museum's educational mission is to provide a unique hands-on educational and inspirational experience for schools, universities, teachers, students, families, and individuals that is not generally available in public and private institutions of learning. The specific mission is:
- To provide a comprehensive living documentary of the evolution of the methods and means employed to produce the written and printed word, beginning with the foundations and implements of writing through the development of modern printing, with special emphasis on the 15th Century Johannes Gutenberg press to the 20th Century monotype and linotype presses.
- To foster academic and educational pursuits in the research, discovery, study, and teaching of historical preservation pertaining to the manner in which writing and printing has evolved and its impact on historical events that influence our world today.
- To provide through public exhibits, tours, presentations, forums, publications, and special events insights into the meaningful and powerful influence the written and printed word has had on mankind as seen through the promulgation of early sacred texts, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and many others.
- To preserve the earliest implements and art of writing and printing in a dynamic world before the memory of their development and their inventors are forgotten or lost.
Religious Mission
As this institution is designed to appeal to the general public and secular organizations as well as religious institutions with divergent belief systems, presentations will be modified to meet the ever dynamic complexities of such groups and individuals. Care will be taken with secular groups not to emphasize a particular religious bias although displays within the museum will be of a historical and religious nature. Unique tours and lectures may be offered for professional and educational groups. The specific religious mission is:
- To teach and preserve the history of those individuals and groups who sacrificed so much for the preservation, translation, and promulgation of divinely inspired records and documents.
- To foster an understanding of the development of printing which comes at a unique time and location, having a profound impact on the history of man and suggesting that its invention is more than coincidental events but follows a divine purpose.
- The miraculous ways in which the Lord Jesus Christ has intervened in the preservation and promulgation of the Holy Scriptures.
- The impact of the press on the Reformation, the founding of the United States of America, the Restoration of the gospel through the Prophet Joseph Smith, and the westward movement and establishment of the Saints to Utah.
- The inspired works of individuals who scripted and translated the scriptures, transcribed and preserved them, and invented the means to dispense them - with exceptional emphasis on the Bible and the Book of Mormon.
- The publication of other records and documents of the Restoration.