Channeling history: A look inside the Indiana State Museum

JASPER, Ind. (AP) - Details on the table were scarce. Nothing, really. But David Buchanan thought it looked interesting and he just had to have it.

What we know now is that the table was built without the use of glue or a single nail and looks as if it's constructed of interlocking pieces of wood, like maybe clothes pins. It's strong enough to hold picture frames or a lamp. And it had been given to the superior general of the Sisters of Providence at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, a college near Terre Haute, by the man who built cabinets for the institution.

On those merits alone, it's iffy whether such an object belongs in the Indiana State Museum. You can't let in everything. Discretion, for curators like Buchanan, is mandatory. But curiosity is also a prerequisite. So Buchanan followed his hunch, hurriedly requested $1,000 of museum money and headed west to Vigo County for an auction. He came back with the table. The work by a man named William Klueh now resides on the second shelf in one of several expansive storage rooms at the Indiana State Museum within White River State Park in downtown Indianapolis.

Does it belong? Buchanan says yes. How does it relate to Hoosier history? Buchanan has the story. The men and women at the state museum yearn to explore and share and preserve. Exhibits change and history happens every day. Their mission never relents.

"I like the fun of the story. Basically we are storytellers," Buchanan says. "The object is a focal point but it's the story people want to know. Walking up and looking at a single desk is meaningless to most people. Maybe it's art. But if there's a fascinating story..."

For that reason, Buchanan is as much detective as historian.

The 67-year-old Colorado native has worked at the state museum for more than 25 years. He's in charge of furniture and decorative objects, but there are other curators who oversee culture, technology, geology, natural history, archaeology and diversity. It's their job to find objects to be displayed in the museum's core exhibits - the overall theme of those projects does not change but the objects within them does - and the temporary exhibits like last year's bicentennial display celebrating Indiana history with 200 items, one for each of the 200 years since Indiana became a state.

Among those temporary exhibits was at one time something titled "Odd Indiana." The goal was to locate all things quirky. Like the table from Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. It's known as the Crown of Thorns table and once Buchanan was granted the $1,000 to buy it - that's a fairly high amount for a curator to be given, and Buchanan spent nearly all of it to secure the winning bid - he needed the background to justify the purchase.

He searched online (Google has made his job far more convenient). He found an obituary of the man who built the table. The information wasn't available online, so he drove to the library in Terre Haute and found the obituary, which listed two sons. They, too, were dead. He found their obituaries. Within the survivors were two grandsons, one of whom lived in Indianapolis. Buchanan wrote the man a letter.

"I get a call and he says, 'I wanted to buy that table at the auction but you got it. My grandpa was proud of that table and he made a second one that we still have,'" Buchanan recalls. "I got much more information, background, tiny details that make it fun to tell a story."

Klueh gave the table to Mother Mary Bernard, superior general of the congregation on the occasion of her feast day and it stayed in west-central Indiana until 2007, when Buchanan swooped in.

Fanning the state is part of the job for state museum curators.

Buchanan makes three or four trips a month to inspect items that could possibly be deemed fit for safekeeping. He never passes an antique mall without stopping to peruse newspapers, magazines and the internet, always with an eye tilted toward what could be. One time, he found a TV monitor encased in translucent plastic. Digging revealed the TV was used in a prison so inmates couldn't hide contraband within the unit. Given that RCA for years had a manufacturing plant in Indianapolis, Buchanan snagged the TV.

Sometimes, he travels to examine objects he has found, like the table. Other times, he takes suggestions from residents across the state who want to donate something they've found, like an 1800s baby crib that belonged to the Gramelspacher family in Jasper and was donated by Herald co-publisher John Rumbach, whose grandmother slept in the crib; for that item, Buchanan and a colleague traveled to Dubois County. For a while, the museum was a dumping ground for anything and everything, sort of like the St. Vincent de Paul. The mishmash means some items must be turned away. Everything that enters must win the approval of all the curators as well as what's called the collections review committee; sometimes, their discussions span hours, and playing devil's advocate is encouraged. Everything that is collected but later returned to its sender or destroyed - the process is called de-accessioning - must likewise be cleared by the same groups.

"One of my jobs is to ask if something has value," Buchanan says. "It's not rare to get rid of things. It's not an easy process."

They acknowledge they have in the past de-accessioned items that probably should have been retained.

There are times, though, that instinct favors good fortune.

A few years ago, Buchanan was prepared to de-accession two vases because the documentation accompanying the decorations listed the items only as "vases" and noted the chipped items were donated by a family in Corydon. Preparing to explain to the collections review committee why the item didn't belong, Buchanan delved into some research and found the vases belonged to an ex-slave. The woman saved the vases all her life and at one point lived in Corydon. She died there. She's buried there. A family in Corydon bought the vases from her and kept them.

"That information wasn't there, but we found it," Buchanan said. "That's a pretty cool story. The vases by themselves? Meh."

A chair from Tell City Chair Company is just a chair until you find out the company was selected in a nationwide search by Jackie Kennedy to create a guest chair for the White House. The museum has a photo of Michelle Obama sitting in the same model, though the Perry County company paid a steep price when officials surrendered to temptation. Buchanan learned from a White House historical group that Tell City Furniture was told not to market the chair as a White House model, but "Tell City created other chairs, painted them different and said they're like the White House chair," Buchanan says. "They never got the contract again. It's a harsh story but a fun story. That's great to talk about."

Same goes for the crib from Jasper, which Buchanan and the review committee approved because a) the museum had nothing like it in its collection and b) because the crib came with a story.

The museum notes say this: "This bed and canopy was purchased by John Gramelspacher for his daughter Laura M. Gramelspacher Shurig. The bed would have been high-style and only practical for very few years. Laura was known to be the last child born to the family so the bed would not be used again in her generation. Laura grew up and lived her life in the house her father built at 327 East Sixth Street, Jasper, Indiana. It cannot be confirmed but it is likely the bed was also used for Laura's children, Anna Marie and Arthur John.

"Though John Gramelspacher was born in Jasper, at the age of 12, following the death of his father, he went to live in Owensboro, Ky. When the Civil War erupted he joined the Confederate army and remained with it for 16 months before realizing he'd made a mistake. He then enlisted in Company E, Second Battalion, 15th U. S. Infantry (Union army). After discharge he returned to Jasper and lived there for the rest of his life. During that time, he grew the Jasper Furniture Company, was a school trustee, the county auditor for eight years, and helped get Jasper's Civil War monument built, along with other civic improvements."

"The bed was a gift from a father to child and everyone can understand that concept," Buchanan says. "It's also an example of an incredible amount of work with the weaving. That bed was expensive."

The bed, for now, remains in storage. Buchanan knows exactly where it is, and the same goes for many of the objects stacked to the ceiling in what basically amounts to a warehouse. There are shelves and drawers and each item is assigned a series of numbers to signify when the item was received, where it came from and how many pieces comprise the entry. The current facility along Washington Street near Victory Field and bracketed by the Eiteljorg Museum and NCAA headquarters opened in 2002 and is an upgrade over the previous locations at an old city hall building and within the basement of the Statehouse.

The museum's self-contained construction team fabricates carts and boxes in which items are moved and stored, and a special crew transports objects (there are college degrees for that). The warehouses are temperature-controlled and lights aren't turned on unless necessary. There's an entire department - with "enough chemicals to blow up lots of things," employees say - assigned to clean objects and inspect them for problems (Buchanan's furniture is often inspected for bugs). Buchanan always wears blue gloves like a surgeon (oil, like light, can damage most objects).

"We think in terms of hundreds of years in preservation," Buchanan says.

Because when you have in your possession a chair that Abraham Lincoln might have sat in for a portrait, preservation is a must.

The chair is a studio prop-arm chair used in photographer Alexander Gardner's studio when Lincoln, along with a host of other U.S. dignitaries, posed to have their photographs taken. It's one of 262 just like it, but by tracing its roots through buyers and sellers and collectors from Capitol Hill to White River State Park, it's evident Gardner purchased the chair from the U.S. House of Representatives because it was too heavy to move and thus deemed useless. His daughter donated it to her church and it was later purchased in an auction and stored at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne. The state museum secured the chair in 2009.

The chair has been on display before. For now, it rests.

The allure is in the details. And you can't spill everything at once.

"We don't display everything we have," Buchanan says. "If people see the same thing every time, they don't come back. You don't want people to say, 'One time is enough, we've seen it all.' With the Lincoln chair, that's an emotional connection, that wow factor, which is what we want to do. We have the everyday object, but we also want the wowsers.

"We have an in-depth ability to tell the well-rounded story of Indiana."

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Source: Dubois County Herald, http://bit.ly/2kjuPS7

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Information from: The Herald, http://www.dcherald.com