A museum is like an iceberg.
What does that mean, you ask.
Because it is cold? Obviously not.
Because it is huge? In some cases maybe, but in DuPage and Kane Counties, probably not.
Maybe because most of what is there is hidden? Bingo!
Museums are like icebergs because most have vast collections of materials that are not on display. Often as much as three-quarters of their holdings are in storage, and sometimes that goes as high as 90 percent, said John Jaros, executive director of the Aurora Historical Museum.
“Most people think when they donate something, it will be immediately put on a shelf and displayed forever,” he said.
It doesn’t quite work that way.
There are many reasons why items are put in storage. For instance, they may be too fragile or need to be conserved. They may be too large or the museum doesn’t have space, even if they’re small, to display them. Or they may just be oddities that don’t fit in.
With so many museums, it stands to reason there are plenty of interesting and unusual objects hidden behind doors in these museums. We contacted the curators to see what sort of fascinating articles they have that the public rarely, if ever, gets to see. They’re some of the hidden treasures of the western suburbs.
Some museums have large collections of certain items, and it would be impossible to display them all at one time.
For example, the First Division Museum at Cantigny in Wheaton has a vast collection of military uniforms, said Bill Lazenby, director of museum operations.
“There’s no appropriate way to display them without making it just a warehouse with people walking through, and if you’re doing that, you don’t get anything out of the exhibits,” he said, explaining that the idea of exhibiting everything that’s in a collection was a movement called open storage, tried by some museums in the ’70s.
“It fell out of favor,” he said, “because it was very difficult to do effectively, it was very expensive to have the collections open all the time, difficult in terms of security and conservation, and hard to maintain control over the collection. Plus the public didn’t respond to it very well.”
And the public has become more sophisticated in the past few years. People who visit museums want to be educated. And they want to touch.
“You have to make room for interactive displays that help people understand things,” said Lazenby. For instance, the First Division Museum uses a lot of space for its dioramas of World War I trench warfare, which are very popular with the public.
“Museumgoers have come to expect more as museums have raised their professional standards,” he said. “They expect interactive exhibits, to see video; they may even expect a touch screen.”
Even as big a museum as the new First Division may have trouble displaying items that are large. Lazenby has a collection of flags that are difficult to display because they are so big, as well as some restored military vehicles, including some vintage Jeeps.
“We have volunteers who bring the Jeeps out for programs or events,” he said. “A lot of museums will do that: bring items out for a short period of time that isn’t possible on a long-term basis.”
Batavia Depot Museum, as well, has some items that are too large for display: two large Newton wagons (grain carriers), manufactured in Batavia in the mid-19th Century.
“There’s really no place to put them at the moment,” said Carla Hill, curator. “We hope to build a space for them.”
Other large items include a collection of huge buhrstones that were once used by General Mills but have been donated to Graue Mill and Museum in Oak Brook. They are being stored by the DuPage County Forest Preserve District. “They weigh up to 2,000 pounds apiece,” said Jim Blaha, administrator. “They’re quite beautiful, quite expensive and quite valuable.”
Space is always a problem, even when items aren’t large. The Kruse House Museum in West Chicago has a fine collection of early 20th Century household tools but no place to exhibit them, said Merle Burleigh, public relations coordinator.
For various reasons, sometimes museums have not been able to set up exhibits to display some pieces. For example, in the basement of the Kruse House, said Burleigh, there are a lot of kitchen items and a washing machine that they haven’t been able to put on display, so the area is not yet open for tours.
The same goes for the skeleton of Bushman, the famous gorilla from Lincoln Park Zoo, at the Jurica Museum at Illinois Benedictine College in Lisle.
“We have some of the hand and feet bones out,” said Rev. Theodore Suchy, curator, “but we don’t have the rest of the bones (on display) because we don’t have the proper place to display them.”
Other items not on display at Jurica include insect fossils going back to before the Jurassic period, as well as nautilus and trilobite fossils.
Some items are just difficult to display, such as a 400-piece slide collection of local architecture at the Wheaton History Center. Also in that same category, said Marcy Lautenen-Raleigh, curator, are some original city vehicle tags, some local architectural drawings that would probably not be of general interest to the public, items in the city archives, and some funny accounts penned by a private investigator in the 1930s. “Those have been on exhibit once,” she said, “but most of the time they just don’t jibe with the time period we’re covering.”
Clothing and textiles, in particular, are often kept from display because many of them are so fragile.
Take, for instance, a mourning dress that belonged to Mrs. John W. Gates, wife of the U.S. Steel and Texaco Oil baron.
“It’s black silk, long sleeved and dates to the turn-of-the-century,” said Sharon Hardey, collections manager at the St. Charles Historical Museum.
Also too fragile to display is a collection of Civil War letters written by local soldiers, said Mark Harmon, museum supervisor for the Downers Grove Historical Museum.
Photographs, two-dimensional maps, city directories, newspapers, railroad timetables (some dating to the 1850s) are just some of the pieces that are too fragile to put on display at the West Chicago City Museum, said Lynn Jenco, curatorial assistant.
“We just can’t afford to lose them,” she said. “Sometimes we’ve made duplicates and put a reproduction on exhibit. If they do go on exhibit, we try to limit them to just a few months.”
“If we have things on exhibit all the time, they won’t be preserved for the future,” said Liesl Dies, assistant curator at the DuPage County Historical Museum in Wheaton. “There’s always a natural tension between preservation and exhibition, but we wouldn’t have things to exhibit if we exhibited them all the time. Costumes are one of our biggest concerns. They are particularly susceptible to light. Some nice examples of dresses that have been on exhibit too long have radically different colors from what they started as.”
Some things just can’t be displayed until some money has been spent on restoring them, Dies said. Like a collage of George and Martha Washington from the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that the museum needs to restore before it can be put out again.
“The best way to preserve some artifacts, unfortunately, is to store them away,” said Jaros, explaining that the best way to preserve a coverlet is to keep it in acid-free tissue paper in an acid-free box and never turn a light on it.
Aurora Historical Museum has an alphabet sampler that dates to 1837 and is one of the earliest things that has the name of the town on it, said Jaros, but it is not displayed.
“It’s a well-done piece but has faded severely,” he said, although people can buy a reproduction needlework kit of the sampler in the museum gift shop and make their own.
Naper Settlement in Naperville has the original teacher’s contract for Lester Peet, dated 1831 and signed by Joseph Naper, which stands as the first document for education in DuPage County. Debbie Grinnell, assistant curator, said they conserve it by not displaying it, but they sometimes exhibit a copy.
Some treasures are on loan to other museums. The Elmhurst Historical Museum, for example, owns a dress and handbag that was worn by a young woman in 1936 to celebrate the Elmhurst Centennial. It’s on loan to the DuPage County Historical Museum.
“It’s a really special object in our collection because it tells a story, but it’s hard to use, because it hasn’t fit into any of the themes we’ve done recently,” said Diane Gutenkauf, curator.
An item may be too valuable to display. The Aurora Historical Museum has a large collection of guns that are too valuable to put out, said Jaros.
And some items serve largely as reference tools, such as the Godey’s Lady’s Books held by the West Chicago museum. They are too fragile to exhibit.
In addition, some items are sensitive in their subject matter and have to be displayed carefully in order not to offend donors or visitors.
For instance, the West Chicago City Museum has the nightstick of a police chief who was killed in the line of duty. “It has been on display, but has to be in the right kind of exhibit and handled with sensitivity for the feelings of the family,” said Jenco.
Also, some recovered vandalized tombstones have been put in safekeeping at the museum in West Chicago, but curators don’t believe they should go on display. “We’re really just preserving them here because we don’t know exactly where they go,” said Jenco. “They’re probably something that would not find their way to an exhibit.”
Many museums used to accept all donated items, leaving them with oddities that don’t really fit their themes. For example, Naper Settlement has a doll collection donated by a local librarian who gathered them from all over the world. Only a few are suited to the theme of the pre-1900 living history museum, said Grinnell, unlike the museum’s fabric diaries of a local resident that include swatches of fabrics and designs of her dresses from 1848 to 1913.
And over at the Downers Grove Museum, they have souvenir items from the Chicago Exposition of 1933, and West Chicago has a piece of the Hindenburg dirigible that exploded in New Jersey in 1937 as well as a plaque that once marked the spot in West Chicago of a Lincoln-Douglas debate. Trouble is, it has been proven Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas never debated in West Chicago. A peculiar item at the Aurora Historical Museum is a samurai sword that was recovered during World War II. Jaros believes the sword should be taken out of the collection and returned to Japan. “It would have great family value to the descendants of whomever it belonged to,” he said.
That brings up deaccession, the delicate task of removing items from collections. It has to be done with care in order not to offend donors, said Jaros. “You have to do it cautiously, because most items have been given in the spirit that they may be preserved for the future,” he said.
The West Chicago City Museum goes through multiple steps to remove items from its collection, said Jenco. “First we identify when we got it, whom and where it came from. Then the director takes it to the City Council and makes the case with her reasons why it is no longer useful. Then, once that is approved, we have to record taking it out of the collection so that when we go back to look for that item down the road, we will know if it was deaccessioned or sent to another institution.”
Recently the museum removed a glass straw that was broken and impossible to repair and some items that shouldn’t have been admitted to the collection in the first place. Among them were reproductions and some lesser quality duplicates of items they already had in stock, plus some pieces that would have been better off at another museum, like some tickets from the old Fargo Theater in Geneva that were given to the Geneva Historical Museum.
Most museums are trying to avoid the difficult and sensitive job of deaccession by limiting their donations to things that really fit their theme.
“I’ll often get people who ask if I want things, but I have to turn them down if I already have six Singer sewing machines dating between the 1870s and 1910,” said Jaros.
Solutions to getting museums’ hidden treasures on display vary. Many, of course, come down to money. Exhibit space needs to be built, or money needs to be spent to restore items. When donations come in, the items may appear.
One solution the Elmhurst Historical Museum uses is to supplement visiting exhibits with items from its own collection. For instance, it recently hosted an exhibit about historical baseball architecture and was able to use some baseball items it had that had not been displayed before because the museum had too few items to make an entire exhibit.
“It made us able to explore a topic we would usually never be able to,” said Gutenkauf.
Some museums use reproductions of some of their items, which doesn’t actually get the real thing out on display but does give visitors an idea of what the original was like. It’s a controversial topic in the museum field, however, lining up people who don’t believe in using reproductions opposite those who do.
“We try to balance it as much as possible,” said Lazenby. So people can see and touch items, Cantigny may exhibit a reproduction World War I uniform or put a reproduction of a belt into the mud wall of a World War I trench.
“People can touch that,” he said.
Museums rotate many items in and out of their exhibits.
“We try to keep changing the items in the exhibits,” said Jenco. “It’s not healthy for an object to be on display for a length of time anyway, and that way, we can get different things out.”
This helps to preserve the items.
“The whole idea of a museum is to educate,” said Jaros, “but before we can educate, we have to preserve.”
