The modern-day house museum stands at a crossroads. There are over 15,000 house museums in the United States, and they can be found in just about every corner of the country. Reaching a height of popularity in the 1990s, house museums have now steadily declined in attendance in the first years of the new millennium. As these small museums, often the only repositories of local knowledge in the community, struggle with long-term viability, the question arises: how do museums stay relevant, or even in business?
I was invited out to the Old Six Mile House Museum in northern Granite City, Illinois, where a group of dedicated volunteers have been charting a successful course in preserving an historic house through creative use of the house and its surrounding property. On a sunny Saturday last weekend, Robin Hogan and Karen and Stan Myers gave me a tour of the historic roadhouse and its gardens.
The history of Granite City and its rural surroundings are not well known in St. Louis, despite the rich heritage of the American Bottoms. Agricultural communities began to sprout up in the bottomlands north of St. Louis almost as soon as Illinois became a United States territory, and the soil, filled with nutrients from the Mississippi River, provided bountiful harvests. Six Mile was a small community named for its distance from St. Louis to the south. Ironically, while the area is now in what might be called “suburban” Granite City, that town was still decades away from its founding by the Niedringhaus family.
The Old Six Mile House Museum itself is on the National Register of Historic Places, listed as the Emmert-Zippel House. Originally built around 1837 by the Emmert family, the dwelling was a traditional farmhouse common at the time. There were two rooms upstairs and two downstairs, reached and separated by a central hall with staircase. William Emmert and his wife, Susan Stewart, lived in the house for decades after its construction. Their farm fields stretched out beyond the house, and since the 1950s have been subdivided into suburban ranch homes.
August and Elizabeth Zippel bought the house around 1884, and their family owned the house until 1984, when it was sold to the historical society that converted it into a museum. While the Zippels owned the home, it became a roadhouse, serving travelers heading up Maryville Road from St. Louis. The first floor drawing room, according to local anecdotes, became a tavern. A two-story rear wing was built, along with a second interior staircase that allowed the hired hand and later travelers to access the second floor bedroom without cutting through the main house. A door cut through the old window frame allows access to the room today. The summer kitchen still stands just to the south of the house. Interestingly, and obviously for safety reasons, the only brick structure on the property is the old smokehouse, still showing its blackened interior after decades of use.
Hogan showed off the recent repairs that he and other volunteers have been making around the house. A brand new roof will protect the house, allowing for the repairs of the interiors. Also, they recently fixed the front porch. Outdated and out-of-character additions, including siding, have been removed, restoring the house to its original appearance. Because the old farmhouse that has survived this long—and played a dual role as a roadhouse—the Six Mile house is an important contribution to the understanding of the history of Granite City. It seems that with far too many house museums, the centerpiece home is not noteworthy for any particular reason other than it is old. The Six Mile House, however, provides an important link to the understanding of the largely rural nature of the Granite City area for most of its history.
Which brings me to the other aspect of the Old Six Mile Museum: its board and volunteers (including President Sharon Engelke, Vice-President Gigi Hogan, Secretary Kathy Engelke, volunteers Karen and Stan Myers, Master Gardener Swalley and Robin Hogan, Construction and Maintenance). This is why it succeeds where so many other house museums fail. The acre of land around the house does not lie fallow, but serves as an expansive and extensively planted community garden. When I was there, the volunteers were busy preparing the garden and greenhouses for more plantings; already a huge crop of garlic was sprouting in neatly planted rows. In coming weeks, over a hundred tomato plants will join the garlic. The produce grown in the garden is then sold from a roadside stand, and the profits are then put back into the museum.
But more importantly, the garden, as well as its beehives and greenhouses, give the house a reason for being. The Six Mile House is not a staid old museum that sits empty most of the year; instead, it serves as the focal point for the local community, much as when there was a tavern in the house. Throughout the week, volunteers and visitors interact with each other, with the gardens and house serving as a backdrop. House museums need to stay relevant to people living today. They cannot power themselves solely on the fumes of nostalgia. Historic house museum boards struggling to find a reason for their institution’s continued existence would be well served looking at the success at the Old Six Mile House Museum.
The Six Mile House is located at 3279 Maryville Road; for more information, visit the museum’s Facebook page.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at [email protected].
