Eyre becomes interim director at Carnegie museum

FAIRFIELD — Lawrence Eyre has been selected to be the new interim director of the Carnegie Historical Museum.

The museum’s board of directors met in January and unanimously voted to make Eyre interim director for at least one year. Eyre assumes the role previously held by Mark Shafer, the museum’s director and visionary who died on Dec. 17, 2022. Jake Schmidt will continue in his role as the museum’s full-time curator and assistant director.

Dave Neff, president of the Carnegie Historical Museum Board of Directors, said Eyre has been a member of the board the past two years, and that the board is pleased to select him for this new role.

“Lawrence has a deep interest and is willing to share his collective knowledge on our various projects and has a vision for the future of our museum,” Neff said. “Our museum needs an individual to be the leader for our day-to-day operations.”

Eyre’s role as interim director is part-time. When he’s not at the museum, he’s teaching American history and world history at Maharishi School in Fairfield, where he’s also the girls’ tennis coach. Eyre has a degree in American Studies from Yale, and for the past six years he’s been research director for Dick DeAngelis’s Fairfield History Series, a documentary series covering different parts of Fairfield and Jefferson County’s history. DeAngelis will release the fifth film in the series later this year, and plans to do eight in all.

“Dick and I have a standing joke that he’s for story, and I’m for history,” Eyre said. “History is best remembered if it is presented as story, but I have to make sure it’s real. I’d like to make sure history comes alive here [the museum] in a similar way through stories.”

Eyre said his decades of teaching history have shown him that children expect history to be boring.

“It’s anything but boring,” Eyre said. “The value of having a place that tells the story of the people who lived here, and looking to see the relationship between what happened then and what happens now, is part of the fun of making a connection with the people who live here now.”

Eyre was born in Davenport, where his father and grandfather worked for John Deere.

“I was a town kid with farm roots,” Eyre said.

Eyre and his wife Laurie have lived in Fairfield for 42 years, and were among the founders of Maharishi School in 1981. Eyre was invited to join the board a couple of years ago, which interested him because he had always admired the Carnegie Museum for being the first Carnegie Library west of the Mississippi River, and all of the treasures it’s contained.

Eyre officially became the director on Feb. 1, and said, “I absolutely enjoy it already.” He added that he’d love to stay on and become the museum’s permanent director after his one-year interim period is over. Eyre said he is honored to work alongside Schmidt, the museum’s board and its team of volunteers.

“We all want to work together to uphold what Mark stood for, both in terms of the beauty of the museum and the informational richness of the place,” Eyre said.