Mohegan — Bits and pieces of the past could bury the little Tantaquidgeon Museum on Route 32.

But the newly refurbished place is pristine, as perhaps befits the oldest Indian-owned and operated museum in America.

The Mohegan Tribe’s repository of artifacts and memorabilia turned 85 this year, a milestone the museum marked last week by unveiling a new exhibit — “Over to Quilting,” which features three quilts dating to the late 19th century, according to Anita Fowler, the museum’s director.

Products of the Ladies Sewing Society of the Mohegan Congregational Church, the quilts were fashioned from squares of fabric found in Gladys Tantaquidqeon’s attic.

Tantaquidgeon, a famed Mohegan matriarch and medicine woman, founded the museum along with her brother, Harold, a longtime Mohegan chief, and their father, John. They built it of granite fieldstones in 1931, the height of the Depression, Fowler said.

It’s never been anything else.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon died in 2005 at age 106. By then, in addition to guiding the museum, she’d pursued an Ivy League education in the 1920s, fought for civil rights in the ’30s, worked for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and advocated for prison reform, social justice and other causes.

Her great-grandniece, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zoble, the Mohegans’ current medicine woman and tribal historian, all but grew up at the museum, Fowler said, “leading tours at a very young age.”

After Gladys Tantaquidgeon’s death, the tribe took over the museum.

Renovations begun in the 1990s were completed in 2008 and new hardwood floors and handsome display cases like the one enclosing the quilts were added more recently. Only in the last couple of years, Fowler said, has the installation of heating, air-conditioning and new lighting enabled the museum to stay open year-round.

“We used to have to pack everything away for the winter and bring it out in the spring,” she said.

These days, the museum comfortably displays artifacts and exhibits in two rooms and plans to turn a third room now devoted to storage into a “story room” to accommodate the many children’s groups that visit.

“This isn’t half of what we have,” Fowler said, referring to what’s currently on display. “We used to be wall-to-wall, but we wanted to be able to rotate exhibits. Being able to do that is quite a milestone.”

Jason LaVigne, a member of the three-person museum staff that includes Fowler and Stacy Dufresne, estimates the Tantaquidgeon has more than 10,000 artifacts, assuming you don't count the arrowheads individually. Only a fraction of the total is on display at any one time. All of the items in the musuem’s possession have been donated, none purchased, Fowler said.

Late last week, an exhibit along a back wall of the museum displayed Harold Tantaquidgeon’s collection of military helmets and other wartime memorabilia, including the Purple Heart he earned during his World War II service.

“This one fascinates the teenage boys,” Fowler said.

Other displays featured a 400-year-old “wampum” collar worn by Uncas, a Mohegan chief, or sachem, and pottery excavated at the Mohegans’ Fort Shantok dating from the 1600s and 1700s. Suspended from the ceiling was a canoe from the Penobscot Tribe of Maine, a gift from Frank Speck, an anthropologist who mentored Gladys Tantaquidgeon at the University of Pennsylvania.

Fowler said the museum, which has an affiliation with the Yale Indian Papers Project, has started to attract visits from scholars, including students from Yale, Dartmouth, the University of Massachusetts and Connecticut College. LaVigne put last year’s attendance at about 1,200, all of it with free admission.

For all its progress, the Tantaquidgeon isn’t about to stand still. Plans call for it to combine with a building to be erected to house the tribe’s archaeology department, now confined to a warehouse. Several structures along Route 32, some privately owned by tribal members and some owned by the tribe, will be razed to accommodate the new offices, Fowler said.

When completed, the structure will join a complex that includes the museum and a replicated Mohegan village with a wigwam, hut-like longhouses, a garden, a fire pit, a dug-out canoe and a crushed-clamshell walking trail, all of which the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation cited in 2013.

The Tantaquidgeon Museum is open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Friday.

b.hallenbeck@the day.com