In and About New York State History; 107; The Making of the Strong Museum

(alert tone) (no sound) (modulation tone) (beep) Hello I'm Jerry Swinney and I'm the first director of the Margaret Woodbury Strong museum. You know collecting is increasingly popular these days and whether people collect furniture or paperweights or oriental rugs or

pottery or dolls they collect for very different and for very personal reasons. Some people collect because of nostalgia and some collect for investment and there are a lot of reasons in between. Certain individuals collect because they're fascinated by the objects. And that was the reason Margaret Woodbury Strong collected, at least in the beginning. For some people collecting becomes the most important thing they do and they dedicate their lives to it. That was true too for Margaret Strong, she had an enormous appetite for collecting. Mrs. Strong collected in a lot of categories but almost all of the things she has assembled and treasured came from the mainstream of the 19th century. Things that were significant in the story of industrialized northeastern America. These objects have a lot to tell us about the changes in domestic life over the hundred year period that followed the establishment of the industrial revolution. So this is the story of a transformation, the transformation of one woman's huge, personal and diverse collection of 19th century American material

into a major educational and cultural institution. This is the story of the making of the Margaret Woodbury Strong museum (music) (music) Let's begin our story with a look at the founder of the Strong Museum. Margaret Strong was born in 1897. The only child of John Charles and Alice Motley Woodbury. The Woodbury's substantial people with a successful buggy whip manufacturing company. Beyond that they invested very early in the business venture of George Eastman and as Eastman Kodak prospered so did the

Woodburys. By the time of her death in 1969 Margaret Woodbury Strong was the largest private shareholder in Eastman Kodak stock. And by the time her estate was finally settled, it amounted to more than 77 million dollars. During Margaret's early childhood the affluent Woodburys traveled extensively through Europe and the Far East. It was during these trips that Margaret developed her penchant for collecting. She always said that each day she was given a shopping bag in which she could put the objects that she collected. She could buy anything she wanted to, until the bag was full. Margaret attributed her lifelong love of miniatures to those early experiences. By the age of 11 Margaret had traveled the world and had amassed quite a collection of dolls, dollhouses and miniatures. She collected what fascinated her and she seems to have intuitively recognized what would surprise and delight others. I think her first love were dolls and dollhouses. I don't think there's any question about that.

I think that toys came along afterwards. I think when she was buying dolls and sometimes she'd buy a group of things there might have been a toy amongst them. And this way she developed a collection of toys. The collection, the doll collection here, I don't know of any other museum that has anything like it. Um, it covers a broad field of collecting. The types of dolls as I see from the early ah 18th century right up into the 20th century. And um it shows the progress of the different countries how uh France at one time was a leading manufacturer of dolls and then Germany and then how United States came into the ah field. She realized that there were specific types of dolls that came out of each country. Particularly Japan because she visited that so many times with her parents.

And of the different types of dolls that came from there. And I think her idea was to try to get ah dolls from the different countries. Showing the different costumes ah the national costumes. And we have quite a collection of those. Perhaps Margaret's upbringing in the company of her elders, led her to select Homer Strong as her husband. When they were married in 1920, she was 23 and he was 45. A native of Schenectady, Homer Strong had practiced law before he

moved to Rochester about 1911. In Rochester, Homer and his two brothers founded a small tool and steel supply firm. After he and Margaret were married her inherited wealth also provided them with a sizable discretionary income. The Strong's only child Barbara was born in 1921. Sixteen years later the family bought the estate at 700 Allens Creek Road in Pittsford, a suburb of Rochester. The Strong's named their estate, Tuck Away Farm and until recently it was where Mrs. Strong's collections were housed. With the death of her daughter in 1946 and of her husband in 1958, Margaret Strong turned most of her energy to collecting. Who knows, perhaps she was instinctively trying to recapture the happier days of her youth. Well I think it was a very lonely time for her, and I think that these particularly the dolls toys and doll houses, fill those

hours ah the rough times that she had. Because she actually played with these, when I would visit her. um She would say to me, well let's go down and look at the dolls because she had them set up in cases in her home. And we would go down and she would say now um. 'What do you think about this doll or that doll' and then she would say 'I dressed that doll'. In other words she worked with these dolls and with the dollhouses I remember at Christmas time she had a tiny Christmas tree in every dollhouse. ah Sometimes she put wreaths in the windows, so that it was a festive time and she worked with the, uh with her toys. This was her life, she spent her life collecting these things always in the in the back of her mind was the fact that she wanted this for a museum. It was like a driving force. Her collecting had almost no limits. In 1960 for example she had about 600 dolls. And nine years

later she had amassed more than 25,000. The number of categories she collected in grew to almost 50, including all kinds of objects that represent popular culture. Mrs. Strong was particularly drawn to mass produced decorative objects and even those things that were utilitarian in purpose were usually a decorated form of utilitarian object. Basically we can use these objects um as a as an index of design. If you have a row of plates for example that range in date from one time period from one date to another you can see how taste and artifacts changed. In the beginning they may have a certain kind of design and later on that design, prevailing design may have changed. And from that we can learn, we can determine what, what the popular taste was and then perhaps try and um interpret and find out why that particular kind of fashion was popular during that time

period. As her collections expanded so did Mrs Strong's knowledge of them, and has many great collectors have done, she soon began to plan for the creation of the museum. In 1968 she applied for a provisional charter from the state of New York for the formation of an educational museum. Well when she um first, I think she applied for her um charter, ah She had a pink check Made up that said Museum of Fascination, and she was very proud of that check, she showed it to me when she first got it. And wanted to know my opinion of it and I thought it was very attractive and very appropriate. She was proud, just as proud as could be of that check. Margaret Strong died in her own home on July the 17th 1969. In her will she left the means and the direction to carry on with her project. Her executors were given liberal and sole discretion to decide what portion of

her enormous estate would be required to see her dream realized. The executors and trustees sought the advice of professional consultants, and after a lot of consideration they decided that Mrs. Strong's collections could indeed form the basis of an educational museum. When you create a museum you're doing something different. ah You don't own for the sake of owning ah or for the pleasure, you you own for the use that you can make of the collection in an educational way. And Jerry and in the first place had to, find some unifying theme in the whole collection what you know what was this educational potential that the collection had and I think his arriving at the concept that this was a collection that could help people understand the social history of, ah, ah mostly 19th century

Northeast America and that it also had most of the material had in common the fact that it was ah post Industrial Revolution. Ah and I think that that's one of the very great challenges of the Strong Museum is to demonstrate how that theme of the post Industrial Revolution and its impact on manufacturing. Ah ah how that impacted on everyday society and providing us with more and better things to live with. And that's what Mrs Strong ah seems to have collected at least a lot of it was and provides a good scene. The next step was to catalog the collections and to find a place to store and display them. You know, cataloging 300,000 cultural artifacts is a major exercise in words and numbers. First a system had to be devised to

name and classify the various things. Put in the simplest terms, the problem is this: are these pants, slacks, or trousers. It's absolutely essential that you make up your mind what you're going to call them before you begin cataloging, because otherwise confusion is going to set in promptly. Now second, because of the sheer number of objects in the collection. Some system better than a traditional card catalog had to be established to store, keep track of and later retrieve the information about those objects. Well we started with a almost unique situation for museums in this day and age in that we had no previous documentation to speak of. Ah we had a very large collection which ah covered all kinds of categories of objects from art objects to dolls to furniture and decorative arts and so on. There have been no,

fairly complete attempt to organize, um and categorize these kinds of collections. So the first thing really that happened when we approached the cataloging was that our director said basically, it's time to stop talking about categorizing history museum collections and begin to actually attempt to do it. So he hired, at the time, one of the few people in the country who knew anything about museums and computers and the staff here along with this gentleman and the director um began to develop a hierarchical categorization system for the ah naming by function by the original function of the object of man made objects which led to a the publication of a book called Nomenclature which is the which is the beginning of how to catalog; what to call the object.

It saves a lot of time, but I would say that's probably the prime way it can help. For instance if we get a request from someone who wants to borrow, every print that has any connection with roller coasters for instance. Hopefully when things were cataloged 'roller coaster' would have been written in as a theme and we could check prints and themes 'roller coaster' and the computer would spit this right back out to us in printed form so we would be able to find things a great deal faster than if we had to do it by hand, or go through the actual objects drawer by drawer because they wouldn't be filed and stored that way. With cataloging underway the trustees turned to selecting a site for the new museum. Legal complexities made it impossible to use the Allen Creek Road site as Mrs. Strong had wanted. A lot of other locations were considered but eventually this 13 and a half acre site in busy downtown Rochester was chosen. Across from Manhattan Square, this location affords the museum good visibility from many angles. It

has space for parking, access to the expressways and it's close to other museums and cultural institutions. The three story, hundred and sixty thousand square foot structure was designed by the Rochester architectural firm of Kalber Meyer Miller and Dungor, and was constructed for twelve and a half million dollars. So let me take you on a tour behind the scenes in this gateway to our past. Along the way we'll see how the collections of 19th century material can be used to create interpretive exhibits. An exhibit starts with a curator whose charge it is to take care of the collection. That means everything from its, their housing proper humidity and temperature control. Repair if necessary or sending it out for repair, by, if it's a really tricky kind of a job, like a painting for instance which we would not do here, but would send to a professionally trained conservator using the collections for research. But we're primarily to sort; save them for the future.

We have an Exhibits Committee which, is consists of the historian, the chief curator, myself, the director of the museum and the exhibits designer. And I guess I would say I'm involved in the creation of an exhibit from the very beginning, because the committee reviews all proposals for exhibits, and then we all look at the scripts as they are developed and we talk about the objects that are going to be used, although the curator has the final choice about selection of objects if we decide to include some hands-on things, for example that person has to try to find the material to use for that purpose. When a scene for an exhibit has been determined, the curator working with the museum historian writes the script for it. I think that our job really is to look at the artifacts in this institution as fragments of history which is I think an initial assumption that I begin with and to then try to put those artifacts within the general, social, intellectual and maybe economic

context of American society, the 19th century. And by that, I mean that I rely on the curatorial staff to tell me what the materials are, who might have used them and how they were used. And from there ah my department expands outward and tries to explain, the way things looked, why they were popular and who might have used them, and how they operated within the culture. of the United States in the 19th, 20th century. After the objects are selected and the script is written, the exhibit is ready for design and construction. At that point we then take it in the exhibit department and start putting it into a space in the exhibit area. We decide where it's going to go in the exhibit area, how much room is required. If you're dealing with coaches or railroad trains. You're dealing with a different ball park than if you're dealing with dolls, and so space becomes an important

factor that has to be plugged into the equation. And if we decide, that the space is right and the script is right and so forth then we start the detail designing. Such as these models behind me, ah, of putting the artifacts and the storyline into space and into the background into the atmosphere and so forth so we believe they should have. ah This goes to the designers, and once the designers have established that this is what we want to do working with the curators and this is a matter of agreement of everybody all the way down the line. ah And once we've all agreed that this is what we want to do then the models go into detail drawings. Those detail drawings then go to the cabinet shop and they start to put the thing together from the structural stand point whether it's building walls,

building platforms, case furniture, hand rails, whatever is necessary. That's that's part of the carpenter shop. And then finally the great moment comes when we do the actual installation. Preparators are in there, they have done their painting, they have done floor covering, whatever is necessary. The labels have been written, by this time they've gone into production and finally the whole thing comes together as an exhibit. The installation of labels the installation of the artifacts. ah The final, ah Placement of things like floor coverings and all of the and a lot of the details that go into it. And this is really what puts an exhibit together. The finished exhibit can now tell it's story, a story about the styles tastes and values of 19th century Northeasterners as shown through their artifacts. Our finished main exhibits are going to combine a great many objects to illustrate a

variety of themes. But now what about the vast quantity of the collections that are not in interpretive displays. The most important of them are on the second floor of the Strong Museum in this area that we call the Open Study Collections Here, there is row after row after row of display cases, where the best items from Mrs Strong's collection of 300,000 objects are on permanent view available for the inspection of any visitor. Now what if you wanted to know more about one of the objects on display in the open study collection? You could find your information in a card catalog by looking up the identifying number. Then if you choose you could go on to further steps and study. The museum library houses 20,000 books, 4,000 slides, and about twenty five hundred trade catalogues and advertising pieces, and there are extensive files of the major periodicals of the 19th century too. Harpers, the fashion

magazines and specialized journals of all kinds. The Library houses basically the book side of the collections. Things which are not books are the trade catalogs a lot of the trade pieces are broadsides. But what really resides here are the patent papers and book material. Also the slide library is available to teachers if they want to come in and support their lessons through their school, particularly for the industrial technological aspect most of the slides are object oriented. And they're welcome to look through the side library and produce duplicates. Of course the museum's educational mission doesn't stop at the library either. A staff of five museum educators plus many skilled volunteers conduct programs for grades 4 through 12 right here at the museum. Multi-purpose classrooms can be subdivided so that they simultaneously accommodate several school groups. There are also programs for adults and the museum features a 290 seat auditorium

for special lectures and presentations. I think tho the major responsibility of the Education Department is to provide organized programs to help people better understand what they're seeing in the exhibits or what they're seeing in the study collections. We try to go beyond the material that is given in a label. And provide more information through demonstrations or slide programs or film or hands on activities which we are including in a school program. One of our concerns has been with special audiences that there are needs which museums really should try to provide otherwise we eliminate a large number of people from enjoying our collections and our programs. So we have gotten into some self-guided tours which we have written and then sent off and had translated into various formats like a cassette tape or large type print or or the Braille format. And then we're going to ask groups when they

call for school reservations for example, if there are any special needs and we will try to provide sign language translation or printed material ahead of time for people who have visual impairments. The adult programs will also try to deal with the same kinds of problems. They will. try to ask each person as they call in to find out about the program or to make a reservation what special need they have and then we will try to deal with that. People in the community can also become involved in the museum as volunteers in almost all of the departments. For example a number of volunteers help run the museum shop which has a special interest for all ages. First of all, I think it gives um the public something that they can take home with them. Ah this is very important. Going to a museum it's nice to be able to take a memory home and that we can provide. Each time the person handles that object or if they give it as a gift

it will bring back a memory of a lovely day they spent with us. Now the Children's shop I feel has another very important maybe two important purposes. One is, in some cases it will be the first time the child may be buying or purchasing on their own and what they take home I want the child to be very pleased that they can show their parents what they spent their money on. Another purpose is a parent sometimes is not comfortable taking a child into the main shop, and this gives an area that the child can shop in comfort. In all cases children are most welcome but this gives them their own little place if they choose to use it. The Strong Museum is a place where you can browse through the past or study it intensively.

Through the interpretive exhibits we can explore a historical period of great change and we can document this change through the study of everyday objects that the society created. When you leave the Strong Museum we hope that you'll have gained an understanding of the commonplace item. The every day things of the last century. But more important than that, we hope you will understand the role that these things have played in the development of the culture that you and I live in today. (Music playing)

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