By Jim Sova, ARCHIVES VOLUNTEER
It struck me as I was walking through the Museum galleries during my lunch hour that the most important and most significant part of the collection and what most people come for, can’t be seen. That part of the collection is not completely invisible and it’s not because the items are locked away and not available to be seen.
People come to museums first and foremost to find out the stories. Stories of their ancestors, stories of their community and stories of the events in history. The job of the curators and archivists is to collect those items that help to tell those stories and then assemble them in ways that make the story easier to understand.
The current display of crazy quilts in the main hall gallery helps to illustrate this point. The quilts are beautiful items and fine examples the handwork done by women and girls in in the 18 and 19 hundreds, but that is not the reason they are in the collection. You have to read the note at the lower corner of each quilt to understand the story of the person who made the quilt or who the quilt was made for to understand the local tie and the story it tells. The quilts are in the collection because of the local tie. The stories behind the quilts goes much farther than the simple local tie. The quilts represent the reuse of pieces of fabric left over from sewing new clothes or saving fabric from worn out clothes, something that every household would be doing at that time. There may well be stories behind each piece of fabric included in the quilt.
Here is an example from a quilt I have. It was made by my mother to cover a worn-out couch I had. The material came from fabric saved from worn out clothes. I remember the scraps on the right from shirts that my father and brothers had worn. The striped material on the left is from a pair of jeans my brother had. Bell bottoms from 1971. I remember the year because he wore them when I went with him to my first rock concert. It was August 4, 1971, I was 11 and it was The Stampeders.
I still hear Sweet City Woman playing in my head. If you think those jeans are interesting, the ones I was wearing were blue and gold striping and my shirt – just as well that no photos remain from that concert.
