The Heritage Museum & Cultural Center — Attraction in Saint Joseph

We had our wedding reception at the Heritage Museum in September 2021. While the day turned out to be beautiful, we had some problems with communication leading up to our wedding day.

The positives: The day of the wedding went very smoothly. The ballroom looked beautiful and was set up just as we had asked. The museum allowed our planner to come in early to set up our decor. The bar staff did a great job (if you're having alcohol, you have to use the museum's vendor). We had plenty of room for 120 guests.

The negatives: Communication leading up to the wedding was poor. We understand there were extenuating circumstances affecting our wedding--we booked the venue before the pandemic's start, and the museum, which is a non-profit, had to go through a lot of changes as a result of COVID. However, they did not handle the changes well. After firing their whole staff and temporarily shutting down the museum (which we were first notified of via a Facebook post), the museum's board president was assigned as our main contact for our wedding. When we talked via zoom and met at the venue, she was attentive and helpful. However, via email it would sometimes take her weeks to respond to urgent questions. We had to remind her of our questions and plans again and again. We often found things were changed up on us--one example being when we were at the museum in person, we were told we could use the museum's vases for candles. Then weeks later over email, we were told we could not. (That's just one example of a handful). The disorganization and miscommunications were frustrating during a stressful planning time.

While the Heritage is beautiful, I would consider finding a venue that has a full-time event planner dedicated to coordinating with brides/grooms or see if the Heritage has hired anyone else for this. All of our other vendors, who also faced changes due to the pandemic, were fabulous and attentive throughout the process so we expected the museum to...

We recently had our wedding ceremony and reception at the Heritage. The venue is absolutely stunning and we had friends and family raving about how gorgeous it was all night. The bar package that comes with booking the venue is an awesome rate, and the bartenders who staffed our event were super fun and super kind. They were true professionals and did an excellent job. In terms of those things, we couldn't have asked for more.

There's a review just below by Hannah Prokop in which she details her experience with some questionable communication during the planning period. My experience was very much the same, though we booked almost a year into the pandemic and not at the beginning. Perhaps the worst instances of miscommunication included us being left without a ceremony musician less than a month before the wedding due to our contact's neglect (despite insistence that we should allow our contact to take care of it), and my dad having to set up all the chairs for our event on his own when we were told we would have them set up by our rehearsal. I won't belabor the point too much, though, as it appears that the Heritage has recently hired additional staff for weddings. Megan, who is one of their new coordinators, was at our wedding, did a lovely job of managing the day and I have full confidence that she would be an absolute joy to work with. I just wish I'd gotten to work with her sooner!

Overall, St. Joseph is a wonderful town for a wedding and the Heritage is a lovely venue. I recommend it so long as you are ensured of personal attention by someone who is focused on weddings. If that is not the case, I would caution brides without organized wedding planners that you may have difficulty getting your questions answered, and find yourself being repeatedly told how busy your contact is despite paying a considerable amount of money for...

Debated between 3 or 4 starts. It's a beautiful venue, plenty of parking, and serves well for a reception hall. I do recommend it for your wedding. However, watch out for the A/C system. Unfortunately there was a problem with it for my wedding causing the 150+ attendees to my reception to end up sweaty by the end of the night. It was explained to me that it's a known issue with competing 2 different thermostats being set. Whether this was the real issue or not there should have been preventive measures in place...especially if known to be an issue. If it truly did break, the facility should have brought in an emergency repair tech. Overall, impressed with the facility. Not so impressed with lack of response or failure to prevent such a known risk by the staff. If you have your wedding reception there, please be on top of the staff in...