Soap, and your museum's collection.

We have several projects happening at our museum. Some are exhibits, some are grounds, some are education, some are everything rolled into one.

We just moved (with the help of a contract house moving company) a 150 year old log cabin onto our grounds. The cabin was not moved piece by piece, but intact, minus the roof, porches, and chimneys. To get the structure through the rather narrow entrance, the truck with cabin in tow was not lined up correctly to make it in one pass. The solution was to jack up the back axle and place the the trailer frame on railroad ties. The second to top piece was rubbed with bar soap, then the trailer frame was slid across the lumber, moving the back end of the trailer enough to gain access into the entrance. The moving process took the better part of one day to transport the cabin from the entrance of the grounds onto it final location in the middle of the park. The bar soap solved the problem, and at the end of the day, we moved a cabin...with our own hands.

History can be taught through your museum's collection only as you are able to handle the objects you are charged with preserving. I'm not advocating teaching art by taking the Mona Lisa off the wall and using it as a hands-on study guide. I simply think that museums can draw a healthy balance between this unthinkable (if not far-reaching) example and using the museum's collection to teach beyond what we learn from a two dimensional book.

The task of preserving an object does take on a significant priority for museums. Yet if museums simply place this object on a shelf and white-glove dusts the object indefinitely, museums lose their informational stewardship (google it). They lose the chance for people to know more about the object; the object loses its context; the very real object become no more important than reading about the object in a book.

Here's a charge for the new year. Get one object off a shelf, and give someone the opportunity to have a hands-on history (or art, or science) lesson. Shalom and happy holidays yall --

Michael C. "Mikey" Sproat
Sam Houston Memorial Museum, Huntsville, Texas

P.S. Next time yall make it through Huntsville, stop by and check out our new (150 year old) cabin. Not only does it have a great story, but I'll also tell you about the soap. -- Mikey.