(trumpets) - [Male Spokesperson] The American Eagle is our nation's most powerful symbol.

Revered by native people for carrying prayers to the great spirit by all Americans for representing courage, strength, and freedom.

The story the Majestic Raptors place in our natural and cultural world, is told in a small Minnesota town in the Mississippi River at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha.

(violin music) (country guitar music) - [Female Spokesperson] National Eagle Center started this eagle watch, in the late eighties when people in the community, local volunteers enthusiasts started seeing eagles come back to this region.

- [Male Spokesperson] Most bald eagles migrate to warm climates in the fall, but in Wabasha, rapid currents keep Mississippi waters open and eagles can catch their fish year round.

The popularity of eagle watching in Wabasha, led to Congress designating it as the site of the National Eagle Center, in 1999.

- [Meg] We got our first director, bought a storefront on Main Street and Harriet became the iconic first eagle of the National Eagle Center.

She became a world renowned phenomenon.

She went to Twin Towers.

She went to, she was on today's shows, CBS News.

She was just the iconic eagle and telling the story of the return of Eagles.

Local people totally volunteer driven raised the money to build this center.

It opened in 2007, to over a hundred thousand guests it's first couple of years, every year.

It's been averaging 80,000 people a year since that time.

We have a great partnership with Prairie Island Indian Community.

They have supported us since this building was built.

(native flute music) - [Meg] Chief Wabasha is on that fountain because this was their homeland.

The eagle is their connection to God.

Eagles carry their prayers to the creator.

Eagles carry their ancestors' souls up to the skies.

Eagles are essential to their lifestyle, to their religion and to their beliefs.

They've helped us build state-of-the-art eagle care and they're starting to share materials with us from their culture, share their stories.

One example we have in the building right now, is a buffalo hide.

It tells the story of eagles and their connection to the creator.

It also tells the history of eagles and humans.

It tells the history of eagles and the blood, all on one buffalo hide.

A couple, at Prairie Island, created the staff for us.

It is the Eagle Nation staff.

It has Otter fur, it has willow, it has a dream weaver, that took the female elder four days to weave for us and they created this as a gift to the center symbolizing the connection between us, the Dakota community and building upon that relationship.

(instrumental music) - [Male Spokesperson] One of the center's earliest visitors, Preston Cook of California, is fascinated with the eagle as an American symbol.

After he left the US army in 1966, he snipped the buttons from his uniform and decided he would collect all things eagle.

- [Preston] In those days, I would go to an antique shop or they would ask, what do you collect?

And I'd say, well, I collect things with eagles, and the usual response was, we don't have anything.

So, I'd look around the store and I'd put some things on the counter and they all had an eagle on it.

And one was a pin, one was a button, one was a postcard and you know, one may be a shirt with an eagle on the back of it and I'd buy it all.

So I started going to flea markets.

So I just would buy the 10 cent item, that dollar item, the $50 item, the $100 item.

And then when the eBay came around for me, which was I think in 1999, then I plugged into eBay and a variety of other auction houses on the internet.

I spent really all of my adult life from the time I was 20 until now, I'll be 76 next week, collecting eagles.

So I married when I was 40 for the first time.

So I brought an aging cat into the marriage and I brought an eagle collection into the marriage and she brought five kids and two grandchildren, so that was our trade off.

Cause I say you can't have too many eagles and she says "you can have too many eagles."

Cause a collection now is some 40,000 individual pieces in the collection, so it probably represents the largest collection ever assembled, I would even say worldwide.

When I started acquiring thousands of items, I realized I was onto something.

I felt okay, I've got this wonderful collection that represents America, it's patriotism, it's symbolism, it's of the natural bird.

The collection we have here, you see a little bit of Audubon, but I have hundreds.

Once the collection started getting large, finding out that there were few collectors, that there was no museum, there was no repository dedicated to the bald eagle let alone eagles anywhere in the world.

I decided that I needed to do something about that.

So I traveled from Alaska to the Atlantic coast and tried to determine a good location that the eagle collection should land.

I think it was 2003 when I first came back here and I kind of landed here and I liked the town, I liked the people, I liked the involvement, I liked the volunteerism here and they had an eagle center.

- [Brett] After the eagle center opened its new 15,000 square foot building in 2007, Preston offered to donate his collection to the nonprofit.

- [Meg] That encouraged a drive to go from the local community to the state of Minnesota, created a bonding measure that went to the state, was approved for $8 million for us to expand the Eagle Center.

First time that kind of money has ever come into this part of the state.

- [Brett] The Eagle Center added an amphitheater, built a new dock for boat visitors and purchased five buildings on Main Street.

That opened more exhibit space for items in Preston's collection, including drawings by John James Audubon, an artist and ornithologist who set out to record all of North America's bird species.

His 1820 drawing of a bald eagle with a goose, six years later changed to a catfish, more reflective of the raptor's actual diet.

- [Preston] And what a lot of people don't understand about Audubon is he took extensive field notes.

So he would go around out in the wild, which is just amazing when you read about it, that this man just went out and grew all of these birds, 435 birds.

I mean he would walk sometimes 50 miles he would camp out at night.

That's amazing story about what the dedication of this man and how much time and energy and devotion he put into this project cause it was a lifetime of work.

What we have here is a eagle that is a piece of ephemera who was supposed to be used, for a day or two in FDRs, that's Franklin Delano Roosevelt's third inauguration in 1941 and it was to be used just on the viewing stand in front of the White House and then disassembled and thrown out.

But, the person that was to take it down, who took it down took this eagle home and kept it.

I bought this from the grandson of the person, that put the viewing stand up and then took it down.

This, this is my book American Eagle and it shows about 1,430 items in the collection.

I have dozens of comic books with images of the eagle, sometimes being the good guy carrying Tarzan or down here with Captain Marvel, but here with Superman attacking Superman.

So sometimes we see it attacking animals, like here Lassie or here Lil Abner.

So, sometimes the eagle is portrayed in a positive light and sometimes as a predator in a negative light.

- [Meg] Preston has some of the best of the best of the best, but he wants everything.

If it has an eagle on it, it's good enough for him.

He has never sold an item.

He has been offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to for people to buy items for him, he refuses to let it go.

One story that he told me when we were pulling together the items for the exhibit was about this doorknob.

He went through a huge battle online auction because he had so many people that wanted this doorknob.

He ended up buying it not knowing its history.

He just knew that a lot of people wanted it, so that meant he had to have it.

He goes back and researches it and finds out by the American Doorknob Collector's Association was from the executive building in DC and if you have that doorknob in your collection, you have the pinnacle of doorknob collection.

Certain people touched it during the history of that building.

That's what makes museums special.

We tell stories.

(bright guitar music) - [Brett] During a visit to a California art museum, Preston met Bonnie Kuhr, who recycles books into art.

He asked what she could do with a damaged copy of his book.

- [Preston] I came back a couple of weeks later and she had this drawing of an eagle wing with an American flag on it from 1858, which represents the statehood and the new star from Minnesota.

It is a piece of aluminum that's perforated with probably a thousand different holes in it and she sliced the different pages to get the coloring to weave through each of these holes.

Bonnie feels that she's the only one that does this kind of altered art, altered book art.

So it's a magnificent piece and then she decided to donate it to the National Eagle Center.

- [Brett] Because the Eagle Center can only display a fraction of Preston's collection, he purchased a warehouse and retrofitted it with temperature and humidity controls and a security system.

The building is filled with everything eagle from shaving mugs and beer bottles to hockey pucks and movie posters.

- [Preston] This was a 1939 movie and the girl who is the daughter of the producer or director of the movie actually took his two year old daughter and put her on a guy-wire 50 feet in the air, had an eagle tied to her and just to get this picture of an eagle taking a child away.

You could never get away with that today.

I wonder if she had any lasting problems because of that encounter when she was two.

(country guitar music) This is an original Warhol and this was done in 1983.

Warhol did a series endangered species and he did 10 different species.

And then we have items like this life preserver off the Potomac, which was FDR's presidential yacht.

- [Brett] Preston will go the distance to get what he wants.

When he learned that Buzz Aldrin was on an Antarctica cruise, Preston booked a trip there so he could get the astronaut signature on an Apollo 11 photo.

- [Preston] This is the only version that he's ever signed, call himself the Eagle pilot because he was the eagle pilot of the eagle lunar module.

(trumpets) - [Meg] If people care about eagles from whatever direction whether it's a live bird or it's a screaming eagle patch on a military uniform, people are gonna have different connections.

We know that Eagles inspire people, they're a symbol of strength, perseverance, importance, cultural connectivity, history, art.

So we are leaning into that addition to our story.

(violin music)