Extinct

What would be lost if the Illinois State Museum closes

STATE | Scott Faingold

There’s more to the Illinois State Museum than meets the average citizen’s eye. The exhibits on display at the museum’s main location at Spring and Edwards streets represent a tiny fraction of the riches maintained by the ISM. Few are aware that the staff of passionate, knowledgeable scientists who work at the museum’s Research and Collection Center (RCC) at 11 th and Ash streets will also be out of work if Gov. Bruce Rauner’s plan to close the museum is put into action. Such a closure could devastate a world-renowned research facility as well as an economic boon to the community in the form of jobs created through sizable National Science Foundation grants. The grants are in addition to the millions in tourist dollars generated by the museum proper.

A hearing about the potential shuttering of all of the facilities in the ISM system – including the Dickson Mounds Museum in Lewistown, the Lockport Gallery in Lockport, the Southern Illinois Artisans Shop and Southern Illinois Art Gallery at Rend Lake, and the Illinois Artisans Shop and Chicago Gallery in the James R. Thompson Center in Chicago in addition to the museum and RCC – was held before the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (COGFA) July 13. Wayne Rosenthal, director of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources which administers the museum system, laid out the governor’s case for closure. “The budget structure greatly reduces available options to reduce spending to balance the budget,” Rosenthal said. “While the museum budget may seem small at $6.2 million, its budget is one-sixth of the general revenue funds received by IDNR.” During the hearing, State Representative and COGFA member Elaine Nekritz pointed out that the information provided to the commission by IDNR was “really slim.” She said that there was no evidence of consideration of loss of grant moneys and no indication of economic impact studies on the communities affected – all information required by statute in these kinds of hearings (and which have been provided by IDNR in previous facility-closure situations). Many of Rosenthal’s statements at the hearing were met with incredulous laughter or cries of consternation – sometimes both – from the capacity crowd. By contrast, a statement from the Springfield city council in opposition to closing the museum, read aloud by Mayor Jim Langfelder after Rosenthal’s unceremonious departure from the proceedings, was met with cheers and applause.

One proposal reiterated multiple times by Rosenthal was the plan to maintain a “skeleton crew” of three people to care for collections across all sites in the ISM system. A recent visit to the RCC indicated that such a crew would be faced with a monumental task.

According to museum director Dr. Bonnie Styles, the RCC does tremendous numbers of public programs, workshops and hands-on activities. There are currently 13.5 million objects in its collection, representing art, Native American heritage, ethnography, botany, geology, zoology and more. The museum is one of very few federally accredited curatorial facilities. “Collections are the core of our research, exhibition and educational programs – that’s what makes us a museum,” according to Styles. “People ask why we have so many specimens. The collections are comparable to a library or an archive. We have people who can read these objects like regular people read books. They have expertise. They can really read the history or the story of the object.”

The 97,000-square-foot former tax processing center has been in use as the Research and Collections Center since 1989, when it was renovated to become what Styles says is “one of the premier collection facilities in the country.” According to Styles, the RCC brings in around $2 million in grants each year from groups like the Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities .

Osteology

One of the major laboratories in the facility is the osteology (bone study) lab run by Dr. Terrance Martin, chair of anthropology. “It’s a very specialized lab,” he says, “one of the most used labs in the Midwest. It contains a comparative collection used to identify remains.” He goes on to explain that it is an unusual lab in that it keeps material from mammals, birds, reptiles and fish all in one place. In a traditional setup there would be a separate lab for each category. “You never know what you’re gonna get in a bag of animal bones from an archaeological site,” he says. The day we visited, a group of students, there on a twoweek National Science Foundation “Research Experience for Undergraduates” grant, were working on ecological studies of fish. They were busily utilizing collections stored along the walls of the lab. For instance, if they came across a fossilized bone fragment and could at least tell it was from a medium or mid-size specimen, they would simply walk across the room to consult what amounts to a physical database of modern remains which they are able to physically compare to the fossils.

“People say, ‘Couldn’t you computerize this somehow?’” says Martin. The problem is, researchers need to be able to do things like turn the bone over and look at the other side. Does it have cut marks on it? Is it burned, is it weathered? “These students are learning that you can’t just do this from a book. We use the modern to help identify the old.”

Archaeology

The archaeology collection is the largest collection at the RCC by far with 8.5 million specimens, including items such as a cedar carving possibly of a Mississippian priest-chief’s face. “With items made of wood, if you had fluctuating humidity it would start to crack,” says Styles. Temperature and climate control would be among the many thousands of tasks that would fall to Rosenthal’s proposed skeleton crew in the event of closure. Also part of the archaeology collection is a fragment of a skirt that Styles personally excavated in the lower Illinois valley. “We found four big fragments of it and we think it is a woven skirt. This is about 1,500 years old – it’s true weaving, over one, under one – made with plant fibers. It’s a beautiful piece.” The fragment was in fact the model for the skirt seen in the woodland diorama in the popular Peoples of the Past exhibit at the ISM. “In fact, that exhibit is based on my research that was done for my dissertation,” Styles says. “A lot of our research is directly translated for the public in our exhibits. I think we’re one of the better museums in the country for doing that.”

On a more directly practical level, the RCC is keeper of the statewide site file, mandated under the IDNR’s own Archaeological and Paleontological Resources Protection Act. “We are the official repository of artifacts and paleontological remains,” says Styles. There are 66,000 sites, all in a geographic information system database. “When there’s a construction project, a team goes out, and if they find sites they send their paperwork here and all of it is entered into this giant database. It is a very important function.” And another that would apparently be carried out by the IDNR’s proposed skeleton crew of three.

Zoology

In the zoology department, Dr. Meredith Mahoney, who holds a Ph. D. in Evolutionary Biology, Systematics and Zoology, is using the entomology collection for her current research on great spangled fritillaries as well as studying the Hines Emerald dragonfly. She describes the dragonfly as the only federally endangered dragonfly species. At one point it was thought to be extinct but was eventually rediscovered in northern Illinois. In a theme that repeats throughout the visit, one reason Mahoney gives for keeping samples over time is that new technologies allow researchers to gather new kinds of information from old samples – such as DNA extraction – which the original collectors or donors would never have dreamed of doing.

The ISM often takes in “orphan collections” from closed museums and similarly the zoology and ornithology departments have often received donations from sources such as family taxidermy hobbyists, a popular pastime at the turn of the 20 th century. In addition to elephant bones, and things like taxidermic walrus, warthog and grizzly bear remains, the zoology department also has a large collection of mollusks. “We don’t discriminate against invertebrates,” says Mahoney. The department keeps a record of mussel species as the Illinois River changes, comparing fossils to current information and the archaeological record.

Paleontology

Over in the paleontology department, Dr. Chris Widga of Springfield, associate curator of geology, is involved in research on the Tully Monster and various other projects. However, preservation and care for the huge collection of prehistoric fossils is at the forefront of his mind. “Every paleontological program has a backlog of things that have not even been prepped,” he explains, introducing volunteer Steve Morse, who is working on fossils that came to the ISM from the U of I Natural History Museum in Urbana when it closed in 2002. These fossils were excavated in the 1950s and never fully prepared, repaired or stabilized. Morse comes in for four hours every morning to prepare these specimens. “He seems to like it a lot,” says Widga, and this is a good thing. “We don’t have the hard-money staff to do these kinds of activities. I do them as I can but Steve’s been really good at coming in and working away at the backlog.

“We’re trying to slow down the time it takes for these fossils just to totally turn to dust,” Widga continues. “Controlling environmental conditions is part of it but this is another part – constant repair and stabilization have to go on.” For example, he shows us a mastodon tusk, which had been on display for years and is now in a state of disrepair. Through time, the expansion and contraction of the tusk itself was different than a plaster plug in the interior of the tusk, and the plug eventually burst through.

Widga is also involved on the higher-tech side of the RCC with the ISM advanced imaging lab which includes 3-D scanners and 3-D printers. “One of our goals is to make our collections and our research as accessible as possible,” he explains. “One way is to go online. Over the past two years we have scanned more than 200 specimens.” These are three-dimensional scans of fossils which will eventually be available for anyone to download and make prints of themselves. Widga showed us “prints” of a shark jaw, and a Tully Monster. Such reproductions are useful for education and outreach. For one thing, unlike actual fossils, they are not fragile and won’t shatter if dropped by an overeager grade school student.

Botany

Dr. Hong Qian of Springfield is curator of botany for the ISM and has received a National Science Foundation grant to study invasive plant species. “These exotic species are a problem not just for the U.S.,” he explains. In Illinois, he says, every fourth species is invasive. “In this state we have more than 1,000 exotic plant species.” Most of these species are from China and Japan, where they only distribute in small areas although here they are widespread. “One theory is that in their native place they have natural enemies that don’t exist here.” The objective of Qian’s work is to help find ways to control this harmful plant life and he contends that the potential savings of successful research are far more than the cost of the research itself. “If we can’t take care of these things now, in the future we will be blamed,” he says matter-offactly.

Qian (pronounced chee-an) is an eminent scientist with 108 scholarly publications to his name – more than 80 percent of these in internationally recognized scientific journals. “Every day I am invited to review papers by others but I have to turn them down, otherwise I cannot do my research,” he says.

Qian recently applied for what he describes as “nearly $1 million” in grant money from the National Science Foundation – but he is acutely aware that if the museum closes, this funding will not happen. News of the potential closing has already been reported in many science journals, which may cause the museum’s researchers to be turned down for any funding currently pending. “If the museum is going to be closed, why would they fund us? This research is comparing Asia and North America in order to preserve both. But if the museum closes, that’s it. A big loss.” Qian points out that the ISM is a job creator: if his most recent NSF grant were to come through he would be hiring seven people to carry out the work, employees who would be paid not by the state through the DNR budget but with the federal grant money. According to Styles, there are many local jobs generated through grants and other “soft money” brought in by the RCC.

Neotoma database

Some of the most crucial work at the facility is currently being carried out by Dr. Eric Grimm, the museum’s director of science and chair of botany, and his Neotoma Paleoecology Database, which acts as nothing less than the infrastructure for global change research into environment and climate. The NPD is a vast archive of all kinds of fossil data – fossil pollen, fossil mammals, fossil lake algae, fossil microcrustaceans, fossil insects, geochemical data – from lakes and excavations. The data tell us about past environments through organisms and plants, according to Grimm. “Ten thousand years ago what was the environment like? It was very different from today. It provides that kind of information.”

Another important purpose, and a source of funding in many past years is what Grimm calls proxy climate data. “The instrumental record [on climate] only goes back 150 years in North America so if you want to study past climate this is the way. Pollen falls in lakes, sinks to the bottom and is fossilized.” The lakes in northern Illinois have been here for between 16,000 and 18,000 years, and this provides a continuous record of vegetation and other life forms which is calibrated by taking contemporary surface samples to reconstruct past climate. “Measures of salinity in microorganisms gives indication of lake chemistry,” says Grimm. “Lake chemistry tells us about drought cycles.” All of this data generated by ISM scientists is freely available from the web at www.neotomadb. org. Using Google Scholar it was found that 700 papers have been written utilizing the database. Scientists can get data directly from the site but an Application Programming Interface allows those on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website to interconnect with Neotoma (Latin for “packrat”). “Scientific research is funded by public money and these data should be publicly available. We are providing that access,” says Grimm.

Fine and decorative arts

The RCC’s fine and decorative art collection is the “new kid on the block,” according to art department chair Jim Zimmer. It started in 1926 with items purchased from exhibitions, although more recently the majority of the artwork comes from donations, including a recent gift of more than 500 quilts from a single donor. “These things come into our collection because on an international level donors realize our commitment to these collections – taking care of them, researching them and sharing them with the public.” In addition to temperature and humidity concerns, textiles must be folded carefully, and periodically refolded, to avoid permanent creasing. “It’s not a matter of just throwing something in a box and sticking it on a shelf, it requires constant care.” Future skeleton crew members, take note.

Recently, the RCC received a collection of artifacts from a single family who relocated from the East Coast to Illinois in the early 19th century and remained here for more than a century. According to Zimmer, the collection tracks history through objects. “Just to see a family come to Illinois in 1857 all the way to the 1970s – it’s a story in itself,” says Angela Goebel-Bain, curator of decorative arts and history. Zimmer goes on to explain that sometimes treasured objects family members are fighting over will end up being donated to the museum as a resolution.

“ISM is the only museum in the state that focuses exclusively on Illinois art and artists,” says Zimmer. The art collection includes a wide variety of dolls, fairy lamps and other decorative objects, which are regularly lent out for display. “We have objects in the Governor’s Mansion, State Capitol and other institutions,” according to Irene Boyer, registrar for decorative arts.

“One of the things I’m very proud of,” says Zimmer, “is that a lot of times in institutions of this size you have curators who specialize in one certain area. We don’t have that many curators so there is a lot of interdisciplinary knowledge at work here. It would be difficult to replace individuals who have that broad knowledge.”

Indeed, for example, Styles, the museum director, has been with the ISM for 39 years, starting out as a curator in anthropology, while Zimmer has been there for 23, beginning as an intern. “People spend a lot of time here and become really familiar with the collections and the history,” says Styles.

“One of the things we focus on is collecting family stories associated with each piece that comes into the collection,” says Goebel-Bain, who is currently working on a World War II veteran’s uniform, which she calls “the most complete uniform I’ve ever seen in my life, right down to his gas mask.”

One intriguing art department acquisition is a large and ornate cabinet in the rarefied category of “tramp art,” a category of work wherein itinerant people – often though not exclusively during the Great Depression – would craft objects from cigar boxes. This particular item is unusual due to its size and function, according to Zimmer, including a space customized to specifically fit a Sears crystal radio as well as a detailed and enclosed crucifixion diorama and hidden drawers and compartments.

The artisan was a hobo named Julian Spurmont (names are often lost) who was moving through Illinois from Canada and stopped at a farm in Kankakee in the early winter of 1911. He agreed to build the large, ornate cabinet out of cigar boxes in exchange for a winter’s room and board. “He and the farmer he stayed with would go to taverns regularly to collect more cigar boxes,” says Angela Goebel-Bain, adding that this greatly angered the farmer’s wife, according to their son who donated the piece.

“If you care about your family’s material at all you need to write it down so that your grandkids and great-grandkids know what this is,” sighs Goebel-Bain. “If the information gets separated from the object it’s just meaningless old stuff.” A fate which may indeed await the vast, impressive and important collections in the Illinois State Museum system if Rauner’s plan for closure comes to pass.

Scott Faingold can be reached at [email protected].