Living in a 100-year-old neigh-borhood in a 241-year-old city in the middle of a 229-year-old nation that sprawls across an ancient continent, I like to think I’m more historically aware than most. Still, I was unnerved to find an artifact of my own life on display in the Missouri History Museum a few months ago. “Those are my toys!” I blurted to a young visitor standing next to me, who happened to be about the age I was when I was given the little ranch house and animals now behind glass. Intrigued, she asked what it was about ranch life that had attracted me, a city kid. The explanation (I loved TV westerns) segued into an engaging trans-generational dialogue about our toys, what they meant to us and which of hers she’d choose to donate to a museum 40 years hence. (A toy makeup kit.)
I’ve since wondered if my exchange with the young visitor could have happened anywhere other than the Missouri History Museum. To look at a wrought iron tool, a crockery bowl, an ivory button, a bisque doll, a musket, a shackle and chain is to be struck by the intense, almost visceral communicative power of the things people leave behind. In this place, as in no other, these accoutrements of work, home, war, servitude become remarkable for the homely beauty—or the profound evil—of what they could do, and those who used them become suddenly comprehensible in human terms. Understanding is ultimately, perhaps, physical.
Indeed, the museum may be one of the few places where two of society’s most fundamental ac-tivities—nurturing the young and transmitting a heritage—come together in a single effort. If we are held together by what gets passed from one generation to another, then this communal attic seems all the more important to Americans, a people who, racially and ethnically diverse, must define themselves less by blood than by shared memory. Lacking a single unifying folk culture wherein grandparents tell the same stories and sing the same songs to our children, we must find other means to learn about ourselves and each other.
As confluence of past and present, the museum thus represents a crucial wellspring of our ongoing collective narrative, particularly in a city that has struggled with diversity since its earliest days. In 1850, 40 percent of our citizens had come from Germany, 20 percent from Ireland, and over the next few decades thousands more would arrive from Italy, Russia, Greece, Eastern Europe and Asia. Africans, of course, had lived and labored here by way of the slave trade from the time of the city’s founding. Perhaps only in a museum can two St. Louisans cross boundaries of time and race, as my fellow visitor and I did, to find common ground amidst the trappings of their lives.
St. Louis is blessed in the 30-odd museums in and around the metro area; none is farther than a day’s drive, and all offer journeys backward, and inward. One of the most innovative is the Missouri History Museum, which has, under the dynamic leadership of Bob Archibald, nearly redefined what a museum can be to a community. The addition of the new Emerson Hall’s 92,000 square feet to the original 38,000, built in 1913, provides ample space for as many as five permanent and semi-permanent exhibits at any given time, some, such as the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial and Captive Passage exhibits, of high quality and acute relevance. And though you may know the Library and Research Center on Skinker Boulevard houses the region’s premier collection of manuscripts, photographs, prints and broadcast media archives documenting the history of St. Louis, the Louisiana Purchase Territory and the American West, you may not know that it’s open to everyone for research or browsing five days a week.
But it’s in the museum’s relatively recent role as forum that it has so effectively provided us with a new means of conversation and, most important, confrontation. Efforts to reach out to the city’s diverse cultural communities through a broad range of lectures, workshops, seminars and theatrical productions as well as social events have paid off: attendance topped 482,000 last year, up 50,000 from 2003, and membership grew from 8,000 in 2003 to 17,000 in 2004. That’s thousands more conversations every week, hundreds more connections every day.
We are never disconnected from our past, which is, as St. Louis writer Eddy Harris observed some years ago, “where we go, many of us, to remind ourselves who we are, and even sometimes to find out.” The museum is our neighborhood, our home, our family. Stop in soon; get to know yourself.
