Museum's Year Closes with a Trill

A flute trio from the Wabash College orchestra treated visitors to the Holiday Open House to a selection of seasonal music. Dozens of visitors enjoyed music, treats, crafts, and free tours of the General's Study.

Join us when we reopen for the spring on February 1, 2010. The Museum will be open to tours by appointment only through January.

HOLIDAY OPEN HOUSE IS MUSEUM’S LAST DAY OF SEASON

December 13 also the final day for public to view “Embattled” exhibit

CRAWFORDSVILLE, IN, December 6, 2009— The General Lew Wallace Study and Museum is hosting a free Holiday Open House on their last operating day of 2009, Sunday, December 13 from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.

The Open House takes place inside the Carriage House Interpretive Center, which is gloriously outfitted in yuletide décor, featuring a Christmas tree decorated in the minimalist style of the Civil War era. Festive activities and toasty treats will be on hand, as well as a fun holiday craft project for the kids.

The Open House will also be the final opportunity for visitors to see the Museum’s 2009 exhibit, Embattled: General Wallace’s Leadership in the Civil War. This year’s exhibit featured authentic artifacts of General Wallace’s from the 1860s alongside a thorough investigation of Wallace’s service in the Civil War. The exhibit was guest curated by Gail Stephens, Wallace scholar and author whose book on Wallace will be released next year.

Admission to the Museum during the Holiday Open House is free. Call 765-362-5769 or email study@ben-hur.com for further information. December 13 is also the final day of the 2008 Museum season. The Museum will be closed through January and reopen for tours on Sunday, February 3, 2010.

Cannas

Now that December is upon us, the gardens at the Study have been prepared for winter. Lantana has been lifted, pruned and repotted. They are kept alive in a cool greenhouse over the winter months, pruned and fertilized in the early spring, and will be ready for planting outdoors in late May.

Cannas and elephant ears have been lifted, cleaned and are ready for storage in the basement of the Study. In the past, we have had only mild success storing cannas, soI'm trying new technics this year. The cannas have been dug, the foliage cut back and bulbs have been cleaned of most soil.

Storage space is limited, so the bulbs will be layered in boxes with a soil-less mix (mostly peat moss) cushioning the bulbs. In the past, no soil was added and some of the bulbs shrivelled. Hopefully, the soil-less mix will help incubate the bulbs. The Study basement is not quite cool enough (45-50 degrees is ideal for storing), but I'm placing the bulbs in the coolest, darkest, dry spot in the basement.

Most of the perennials are cut back and shredded leaves are added to the garden for some extra winter protection. Plans are underway for a great 2010 season. Planting the gardens to look different every year, using period (1885-1905) plants and flowers require loads of research and many enjoyable hours looking through gardening catalogs, books and historical periodicals.

Third Annual Holiday High Tea Benefits General Lew Wallace Study and Museum

One-of-a-kind event features holiday décor, refreshments, fashion show and door prizes

CRAWFORDSVILLE, IN, November 22, 2009— Holidays and history bring the community together for the third annual Holiday High Tea and Fashions, a benefit for the Lew Wallace Study Preservation Society scheduled for Friday, December 4, between 3:00 and 5:30 p.m.

This year’s event will be at the Herron House at 406 W. Wabash Ave., an historic building owned by Wabash College and carrying a great deal of community history. “General Lew Wallace used to sit on the veranda for hours at a time,” said Alice Phillips, who currently resides in the house with her husband, Dean of the College Gary Phillips. “He and William [Herron] were good friends and they would talk for hours about the issues of the day.” Among some of the house’s most beautiful features are the curved grand staircase, five hand-carved fireplaces, and stained glass windows that grace the front of the house and the lower level of the stairs.

The Holiday Tea is an open house complete with tea, sweets, and savory snacks served from the built-in dining room buffet. Local models will show off fashions from Formal to Fireside by heathcliff, and the Herron House will be decorated with seasonal floral arrangements by Milligan’s Flowers & Gifts. Door prizes from local merchants will also be drawn every half hour, giving event-goers several chances to win accessories and decorations to brighten their own homes.

“The holidays are about celebrating and giving, and we do both with this event,” said Anita Klein, chair of the Planning Committee. “The Holiday High Tea and Fashions is a chance to get together to enjoy food, fashion, and a festive atmosphere while supporting one of the gems of Crawfordsville.”

Reservations are $20 per person and due by December 2. No tickets will be available at the door. To reserve places for you and your guests, call the Museum at 765/362-5769.

Pack rats

How do you pack over 1,200 books for storage? Very carefully...

Volunteers learned the procedure for packing up General Wallace's books.

Working in pairs, packing volunteers pulled books from the shelves individually, cross-referenced each title with the list to make sure we have a record of it, and made a packing list for each box. We did NOT use white cotton gloves like we usually do to handle artifacts because the cotton can catch fragile pages or bindings and do more harm than good. Instead, we washed our hands REALLY well several times during the workday.

The books were packed carefully in boxes lined with buffered tissue, and more fragile books were tied with white twill tape to make sure they don't fall apart when moved.

Collections Manager Amanda McGuire (center) led the charge by instructing volunteers and troubleshooting problems, and Wabash Archivist and Museum Board Member Beth Swift gave a ton of professional assistance!

We got a few surprises, too: who knew there were books behind books? No wonder we couldn't locate them during the inventory!

Now the boxes are numbered and ready to store. Thank you to all our packing volunteers and staff who came in especially for packing day!

Lew and the Snooze

Archaeologists have found evidence that clocks have existed as early as 400 BC clocks run on water existed in China and the Greeks had early mechanical clocks in the 1st century BC. In the early 13th century clocks even had alarms set on them to make a motion or sound at the same time everyday, which were often used to call monks to prayer or meals. These signals were fixed and in order to change them you had to change the fundamental mechanisms of the clock itself. It was also around this time that scholars find references to clocks made of gears and weights. These clocks worked in much the same way as the water counterparts in their use of gravity, but now there was a physical weight instead of pouring water. Whether it is by gears or water, clocks stayed the same for hundreds of years until the advent of microchips and digital technology.

So where, you ask, does Lew Wallace factor into all of these useless clock factoids? Well, the clock has undergone several innovations and improvements, one of which is the advent of the snooze button. Some people have mistakenly credited this to General Lew Wallace, but this just is not true. Says one blogger (http://www.thebluesmokeband.com/alarm.clocks.php), “Stated simply: the snooze button has left me less than satisfied. Given this, I naturally wanted to find a place to lay blame. Who better than the inventor of the snooze button: Lew Wallace.” A careful examination of the history of the clock and its many assets shows us why this just cannot be, but first we must absolutely decide what the snooze button really is.

The snooze button allows the clock owner to set an alarm on his/her clock and when the alarm signals the proper time the owner has the option of resetting that clock for a prescribed amount of time. It is possible to reset a mechanical alarm and even to do so with little effort, but it involves actually changing the alarm time. You cannot patent an action like that, so the snooze button must also involve the owner triggering some kind of predetermined signal that does not necessarily have to go off. This kind of manipulation of a clock was only really available until the General Electric-Telechron in 1956. Not too much later the digital revolution changed clocks forever.

General Wallace died in 1905, a full 51 years before the first marketed snooze alarm. He also could not have invented the alarm itself because an Ottoman engineer, Taqi al-Din, writes about a mechanical alarm clock in his book, The Brightest Stars for the Construction of Mechanical Clocks, which was published somewhere around 1556. Even in the United States the first clock patent goes to Eli Terry On November 17, 1797. It is just not possible for Lew Wallace to have invented the snooze alarm and in fact his own clock is a weight-driven Tiffany timepiece that is still functioning at the Museum.

Researched and written by museum intern Will Finney, Wabash College '10

Moving the Clock 11-10-09

Moving the Clock 11-10-09, originally uploaded by WallaceStudy.

General Lew Wallace's 1898 Tiffany grandfather clock, custom made for the General in New York to match his Study here in Crawfordsville, gets installed in its temporary home inside the Carriage House Interpretive Center. As shown in this video, the clock juuuuuust fits.

Moving the Clock 11-10-09

Moving the Clock 11-10-09, originally uploaded by WallaceStudy.

Moving the Clock 11-10-09

Moving the Clock 11-10-09, originally uploaded by WallaceStudy.

Time to Move

Before the onset of any cold rain typical of November in Indiana, we decided to remove some of the most significant artifacts from the Study in preparation of the Study Restoration Project. This week we moved Lew Wallace's custom-made grandfather clock from the Study to the Carriage House Interpretive Center.

Museum Director Larry Paarlberg and local clock specialist Hubert Danzebrink remove the weights and pendulum from the body of the clock.

Larry and three of the Crawfordsville Park and Recreation Dept. maintenance crew carry the clock from the Study building to its temporary home in the Carriage House Interpretive Center. Collections Manager Amanda McGuire instructed the guys not to wear gloves because gloves may make it more likely for the clock to slip from their hands, doing much more harm than the oils in their skin.

Larry, Chris and Bill carefully put the bonnet back over the works of the clock. There was not much room to spare! The clock looks even more stately in the smaller space of the Lynne D. Hohlbein Education Room than it did in the Study.

Reception for New Director Larry Paarlberg

The Staff and Trustees of the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum welcomed new Museum Director Larry Paarlberg with a reception in his honor on Thursday, October 22, 2009. Members of the Lew Wallace Study Preservation Society gathered at the Carriage House Interpretive Center to meet Paarlberg, mingle, and of course enjoy fabulous hors d'oeuvres on a misty autumn evening.

"I've never felt more warmly welcomed," said Paarlberg of the evening's festivities. "I'm so impressed that so many people turned out in less-than-stellar weather. And the trustees should rent themselves out to New York caterers, the food was so good."

Paarberg started at the Museum on October 1 and has already had experience with visitors from the community, school tours, and grant presentations in his short tenure. Among his current duties is overseeing the Study Restoration Project, beginning this fall.

Help for Crumbling Buildings

Monday we hosted an Historic Structures Workshop, organized by both the Indiana Historical Society's Local History Services and Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana. Geared for professionals and volunteers in history organizations located in historic buildings, staff and board members from as far away as Cincinnati convened to troubleshoot the various problems they face with their historic structures. Architect Judith Kleine, also a veteran faculty from the Lew Wallace Youth Academy, provided images and criteria to assess historic buildings for construction issues. John Reid, owner of Pioneer Restoration in Lafayette, spouted a wealth of information related to care and restoration of masonry, wood, and windows in older buildings. He has done a great deal of work throughout the region on courthouses, historic homes, and museums, and answered even the toughest questions with expertise. At different points, we took the group around the Study to show some of the masonry issues we're facing now with the Study Restoration Project, and then later to Lane Place to discuss wood and paint issues. We were very pleased to host the group and provide a venue for discussion and professional development. Many thanks to Stacy Klingler of Local History Services and Tommy Kleckner wtih Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana for letting us be a part of this event!

The Slow Move Begins

The money is in and the process has started to find a contractor to replace the dome on Lew Wallace's 111 year old study. This means that we also have to start packing up all of the General's artifacts in the study to be put in storage while the dome is being repaired. Several volunteers worked hard to make an inventory of the more than 600 books on display and the musuem staff has been formulating a plan for how to pack everything and where everything should go.

Grounds keeper Deb King and collections manager Amanda McGuire started moving artifacts today in order to clean out the inglenook so the architect and potential contractors can get up to the dome to decide what needs to be done to repair it. The access to the dome is in the ceiling of the inglenook area and we don't want to take any chances of damaging artifacts by leaving them out while people are climbing up and down a ladder. Some items are still on display in the study but have moved to new locations. Other artifacts were brought over to the Carriage House for long term storage in the vault and some items were moved to Lew's cabinets for oversized books for temporary storage.

Part of the process of packing the artifacts is ensuring that each item has a unique three-part number to tie it to information in our collection database about what it is, where it is located and who donated it. Most of the artifacts have a number assigned to them but the number was never written on the artifact. A special process is used so that the number can be removed without causing any damage to the item.


Staff and volunteers will continue the process of packing up books and artifacts through the end of the year until construction begins. Some artifacts will be packed away and stored for a few years to allow them to "rest" so we can keep them for many years to come. These items will be brought out for special exhibits in the carriage house but will not be on permanent display in the study anymore, so be sure to make a trip out to see the General's "pleasure house for the soul" before the restoration work begins!

Last Piece of the Puzzle

The General Lew Wallace Study & Museum received a $51,000 grant from the Montgomery County Community Foundation for the Study Restoration Project! The Community Foundation has been a strong contributer to the Museum, and we are thrilled that they have continued to support us. Our request was especially dire this year with the Study roof needing replacement very soon. This grant is the last piece in the funding puzzle for the Study Restoration project, and now the wheels are really turning. We have started meeting with architects and lawyers, talking about bids and project scope, and fitting the work items into the funds we have. Work will begin in the next few months, so keep a lookout for progress updates!

National Medal for Museum and Library Service Awarded to Indiana Museum, Second Year in a Row!

This was taken from a release from the Association of Indiana Museums (AIM). Please visit their website at indianamuseums.org for more information.

The National Medal for Museum and Library Service, awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, recognizes five museum and five libraries each year, for programs and services provided to the nation and to the communities they serve. An Indiana museum has received a medal for two of the three years that IMLS has made the awards.

In 2008, AIM was proud to announce the news of the award received by the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum (Crawfordsville). This year, the Indianapolis Museum of Art receives the honor.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), formerly known as the Art Association of Indianapolis, was founded more than 125 years ago on the principal that art should be cultivated, studied, and available to all. Today, the IMA upholds these original tenets through programs like Viewfinders, an art viewing program that invites children to visit the museum with their teachers, think creatively, and share their ideas about the art with one another; and the Museum Apprentice Program, an initiative for high school students that supports mentorships with prominent artists on projects that develop leadership skills and expose them to the arts fields. Happily, visitors can appreciate the most comprehensive visual arts institution in Indiana for free, a recent and impactful change. Click here for complete IMLS release.

Artists in Residence 2009

Artists in Residence 2009, originally uploaded by WallaceStudy.

Artists in Residence 2009

Artists in Residence 2009, originally uploaded by WallaceStudy.

Artists in Residence 2009

Artists in Residence 2009, originally uploaded by WallaceStudy.

Artists in Residence 2009

Artists in Residence 2009, originally uploaded by WallaceStudy.

Mother Nature provided us with yet another beautiful autumn day for our sixth annual Artists in Residence Program on Sunday, October 4. Five artists and six art educators gathered on the grounds of the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum to demonstrate their artistic talents for Museum visitors. Over 200 people visited the Museum to see these talented individuals and to try their hands at making art themselves.

Seed collecting

Fall has arrived and the winterization of the gardens have begun. Peonies have been cut back and soon to be moved to a new location, leaves are being mulched and the squirrels are busy gathering and burying nuts.

One of the fall tasks is the collection of seeds from annuals. Celosia, nigella and black-eyed susan seeds are collected and sowed in the late spring the following year. This year the celosia (Flamingo Feather) has been a highlight of the Study front garden. Visitors ask questions when seeing these plants and are invited to touch the soft, feathery bloom. The spike-like blooms holds hundreds of seeds.

In collecting the seeds I cut the stem of the plant and place the flower spikes in a paper bag. I will let the blooms dry for a period of time and then shake the seeds from the spike. The seeds are stored in glass jars in a dry, dark area over the winter. In late May, I rake up a small spot in a sunny location and sow the seeds, water them well and wait to enjoy a great summer accent.