SALISBURY — Aaron Kepley is officially the new executive director of the Rowan Museum after the board of directors met earlier in January and approved the move.

This will be Kepley’s second time at the museum’s helm, having previously served as the director from 2016 to 2022. At the end of 2022, he left due to a family situation which is close to being resolved, he said.

He was followed by and is following former director Evin Burleson, who moved to become the director of finance and administration for the N.C. Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. After Burleson’s resignation, Kepley was named the interim and has been acting in that role.

Kepley said that he is looking forward to returning to the organization and communities that he grew up around and had enjoyed working in before his “sabbatical.”

“I’m originally from Rockwell and I grew up with most of my great-grandparents around, so I heard a lot of the history growing up. Really that has been the best thing is walking down Main Street in Salisbury to get lunch and everybody saying, ‘oh hey Aaron, how’s it going.’ That’s been very affirming, because so many people have been excited to have me back,” said Kepley.

Kepley originally came to the museum from the Reed Gold Mine, the historical site of the first documented gold find in the United States in southern Cabarrus County.

Kepley said his prior experience running the organization and his work as the current interim director would allow him to hit the ground running once the decision was made official.

“I’m not coming in with a completely blank slate. Evin did a great job of keeping everything going, and the goals that I have are not foreign to me and the organization is not foreign to me,” said Kepley.

He said that he will be officially “reintroduced to the community” on Jan. 28 at the museum’s annual meeting, where he will give the state of the museum speech to the community and go over his vision for the organization.

“I want to continue a lot of the work that’s been done since the end of the pandemic to rebuild our programming from the effects of the pandemic, put the museum back in the forefront of the community and continue to get the name recognition out there. We are a nonprofit and if we don’t have the support of the community we won’t be able to exist,” said Kepley.

Kepley’s two main goals after he officially sheds the interim title revolved around the idea of being at the “forefront of the community” and included continuing to build up community partnerships and building up education programs through connecting with local schools and colleges.

For now, Kepley said that he has been holding back on rekindling some of his connections because he did not want to make things tougher for another person if the museum board of directors chose another candidate. However, he said that in February he fully expects to “put things into high gear and (take) off.”

Even while he was away from the museum professionally to work on the family situation, Kepley was spending time there helping with different programs and classes.

“I’ve been working a lot on the back end of things, helping the curator organize the collection, helping to plan some events. Even while I have been gone, I’ve been helping with the history class, just continuing to lend my expertise to make the museum better,” he said.

Kepley said that he was also spending time working on a book on the history of Rowan County, and he was able to put some of the information he researched into the museum’s exhibits.

For now though, Kepley said that he was focusing on the two programs that the museum has in the near future, which included the history class that starts on Thursday and the museum’s history club on the second Tuesday of every month, which he said has a “great slate of speakers” lined up. For more information on the museum and its upcoming programs, visit its Facebook page or rowanmuseum.org.