The danger to the objects “hurt my curatorial soul.”
On the other hand, no soul was so warmed by the conversion of the old City Building into the current Heritage Center of Clark County. And with the approach of the 20th anniversary of the museum’s opening Wednesday, Weygandt sat down to discuss the center and her career.
Now the museum’s Emeritus Director of Collections, she said that even when the Historical Society was able to provide access to a small portion of its archives while shoehorned into an old house Fountain, she was optimistic about its future.
And for one major reason:
“The donations (of objects) never stopped,” she said. “The fact that people constantly were saying ‘This is our history, take care of it’ was always a humbling experience.”
Another plus was that over the decades, caretakers of the historical society had curated what Weygandt considered a “very clean” collection of artifacts that were of good quality, 85% local and unburdened by a lot of throw-ways.
To a curatorial soul, those objects were never inanimate things of the past but the life of the party.
“When we talk about objects, we talk about people,” Weygandt said. “Because the connection is so intimate, literally cradle to grave” – from the baby’s beloved blanket to the treasured flag that draped a beloved veteran grandfather’s casket.
Sorting through the objects to tell stories of local history in a new museum began when 25 moving vans worth of material were collected from the four county locations into a warehouse on Thompson Avenue.
As the T-shirt the staff gave her when she retired says, the massive undertaking was “a moving experience.”
Using a local historical timeline, exhibit designers Bill Brown and Dave McClain quizzed Weygandt about what objects were available. Once they’d chosen items for display, she handled the logistics of sending them to conservators to be both repaired and prepared for exhibit.
The Conestoga wagon that is a prized piece in the collection provided Weygandt with object lessons – bad and good – she will never forget.
Staff were taking the top section off the wagon for shipping to a conservator “when, all of a sudden, this thing starts collapsing,” she said.
Only after the madness passed did they realize the wisdom of the method.
“Because it was collapsible – or in a sense flexible – then every time you’d go over a bump, the body would flex so that the things inside wouldn’t jar so much.”
And that pointed to a larger lesson about history.
“Too many people go, well that was way back then, like they didn’t know anything. But the truth is they were adapting and using and thinking and planning and analyzing and experimenting all the time, just like we are.
“It was just different types of things, different problems to solve, different materials. But that creative spirit has not been lacking in other generations or other cultures.”
She saw that creative spirit at work on the entire team involved in fashioning the exhibits.
Experts in time period paints not only found the right recipe for freshening up the wagon, but recreated brushes of the sort used on the original paint job.
And a second memorable lesson came wrapped up in apparent disaster.
“All of a sudden,” Weygandt said, “one of the volunteers came panting and said they’re painting the artifacts,” which would have been ruinous.
In reality, something else was afoot.
“What they were doing, these clever mounters, was that they painted the mounts like the objects themselves. The mount mimicked the object, so that when the object was hung, all you saw was the object, not the mount. I was like, ‘Oh, I love you.’”
And after the work was completed piece by piece and exhibit by exhibit, Weygandt was more than pleased with the public’s reception on opening day 20 years ago:
“That was such a packed weekend, and it was cold. It was March, but it snowed that morning. People stood in line for hours.”
And from a weekend that was something of a blur, she retains a clear memory of the sense of awe and reverence among the visitors.
“People were saying, ‘Hey, did you see this over here?’ And, ‘Come on, this is what I found over here.’
“And all the time it was: ‘Wow, this is coooool.’ "
Weygandt feels much the same about her career.
“When you’re head of a small organization, you get to do everything. And what I appreciate and still appreciate is that I did get to do everything.
“I got to do archive work for almost five years before the museum was open, so I got to intimately know archival materials. Then I got to work extensively with these talented, creative people in the design process.” And once the museum project was finished, her alma mater, Wright State, came knocking.
“They asked me to do things like, well, ‘Why don’t you teach that? Why don’t you talk about that?’” Her early responses included: “I don’t know if I can. I haven’t done that. I’m basically a very shy person.”
“And that’s what always kept me energized for 31 years: It was like it never got old.” And, whenever that seemed to be happening, “someone came through the door with something I’d never seen before.” That, of course, provided her with “a brand new set of stories and new things to understand and new things to incorporate.”
It was all chicken soup for a curatorial soul.
20th anniversary celebration Wednesday on Zoom
The Clark County Historical Society will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the opening of its Heritage Center with a 7 p.m. program Wednesday on Zoom. As part of Women’s History Month, the program also will share the stories of some of the amazing women who have played important local roles. The program is free. Register in advance at https://cutt.ly/anniversaryhc
In November, the Historical Society’s Curatorial Department provided a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the Heritage Center museum from Springfield’s City Building and Marketplace. Then Director of Collections Virginia Weygandt, Senior Curator Kasey Eichensehr, and Curator of Library and Archives Natalie Fritz also shared stories of the restoration of artifacts found in the galleries. Look, too, for a clip of a promo for the museum’s opening featuring late Jonathan Winters. Go to https://cutt.ly/HeritageCenterBTS