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Journey Stories opens in MO

Journey Stories, the Smithsonian’s latest Museum on Main Street traveling exhibition, opened last weekend at Bonniebrook in Walnut Shade. Using a wide range of engaging visuals, audio clips, music, maps and artifacts, Journey Stories brings to life the personal paths of immigrants, slaves, explorers, business tycoons and historical figures whose travels have led from the Mayflower to the Golden State.

“The American story is unique, shaped by innovation in transportation, the personal will of many desperately desiring freedom and many others denied freedom’s promise,” said Anna Cohn, director of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES). “From the Trail of Tears to Depression-era migration, Journey Stories showcases America’s history of travel and transportation and helps visitors understand the connection of our ancestors to geography, events and the development of new modes of transportation.”

Visitors to Journey Stories will navigate four centuries of American history while experiencing the joys and hardships of journeys past. Read more…

“Reflections from a MoMS host”

Contributed by Michele Hansford, MHC Board Member and Director of the Powers Museum, Carthage

When you are involved with a local history museum that, from its very start in 1988, decided not to have permanent exhibits but devote itself to annual and shorter-term exhibits developed in-house and from outside organizations, you might think:

1. The museum Director is kept quite busy!
2. Traveling exhibits of any type are not a big deal to a museum audience used to seeing an ever-changing menu of exhibits.

Well, being the director of this local history museum—the Powers Museum in Carthage, Missouri—the answer to #1 is a resounding “Yes,” especially after 22 years of doing those exhibits. But after all that time, the answer to #2 is “No,” especially when the Smithsonian name is attached to exhibits like those offered by the Museum on Main Street (MoMS) program offered by the Missouri Humanities Council.

In 2003 the Powers Museum was one of the stops on the MHC/MoMS Produce for Victory: Posters on the American Home Front 1941-45 tour. While it was not our first Smithsonian traveling exhibit (we had rented a SITES exhibit a year prior), it was our first experience with an exhibit that required the museum to arrange for a high level of programming as part of the experience. Plan we did!  Read more…

Get Carried Away by a Book

by Julie Douglas, MHC Family Program Specialist

Many heartwarming and inspiring stories come to our office from the READ from the START (RFTS) Discussion Leaders. But this one was in a league of its own!  According to veteran RFTS leader and storyteller extraordinaire Steve Otto, life imitated art at a recent program in Sedalia. “We had just started reading Frederick by Leo Lionni,” Steve began.

Frederick is the story of a little mouse who collects words and images while his fellow mice collect grain to sustain them through the winter. While at first it may seem that Frederick will have nothing to contribute to the group once winter comes and the food begins to dwindle, the magic of his words comforts and distracts the mice as they wait for spring.

“The coordinator came running into the room and said that a tornado was on the ground just south of town and we needed to get into the building shelter right away,” Steve continued. “Some of the group began to get upset, so I told them to take their books and we headed to the shelter.” Read more…

MHC Grant Highlight-  The 2010 J. W. “Blind” Boone Ragtime & Early Jazz Festival

Contributed by Jim Tanner, MHC Board Chair

Having attended the Sedalia Ragtime Festival several times previously, Carole, my wife, and I decided this year we would attend the “Blind” Boone festival in Columbia instead. Some of our favorite performers would be there: Mimi Blais, Frederick Hodges, and Butch Thompson, formerly of A Prairie Home Companion. We had heard Morten Gunnar Larsen’s Ophelia Ragtime Orchestra from Denmark give an outstanding performance in Sedalia several years ago of Scott Joplin’s opera, Tremonisha. An added bonus would be the appearance of Richard Dowling, one of the Steinway company’s piano artists who had recently completed a stint as artist-in-residence at Carole’s alma mater and who is the several-generations-removed nephew of the hero of the Texas Revolution for whom her junior high school was named. In addition to the four formal performances in two days, there would be two seminars funded by the Missouri Humanities Council. In one, Reginald Robinson, a 2004 recipient of a “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, would talk about and show parts of his documentary film about the history and development of ragtime music. Read more…

Exhibit Opportunities

The Missouri Humanities Council continues to offer opportunities for organizations throughout the state to host a variety of small-scale exhibits. Visit the Council’s “Museum and Library Enrichment”web page for more information on hosting Homeland: The Sac and Fox Heritage in Missouri and Picturing America traveling exhibits.

The Way We Worked, a brand new Museum on Main Street exhibition from the Smithsonian, is coming to Missouri in 2011. Six Missouri communities will be selected to host The Way We Worked between September 2011 and July 2012.  More information and application instructions will be included in the Council’s July edition of Missouri Passages.

A Message from the Executive Director

by Geoff Giglierano, MHC Executive Director

Passing Through the Landscapes of History

Journey Stories is now touring Missouri. The subject matter of this exhibition is essentially about the mobility of Americans: the journeys we took to get here and the journeys we continue to take as we try to make better lives for ourselves and our families. Having led a somewhat nomadic existence for a good portion of my career (it pretty much goes with the territory when you are doing consulting), I feel a substantial degree of kinship with the people whose stories make up this exhibit.

Pony Express Route: www.uswhba.org/pony_express_news_letter

This is particularly true when I reflect upon the last couple of years, during which I went from working in Connecticut to California, and then to here in Missouri. Getting to my destinations involved driving along highways that followed routes which corresponded to portions of the old Lincoln Highway, the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and even parts of the Pony Express route.

If you have to get from California to Missouri—or vice versa—I really recommend that you drive the route if you have time to do it that way. Especially if you travel along I-80, you will pass through landscapes that would be very familiar to 19th and early 20th century travelers. It is wonderfully easy to imagine many different people moving along those routes, on foot, on horseback, in train cars pulled by steam locomotives, in wagons, or in early motorcars, and you can picture in your mind what they must have gone through.  Read more…