Old things in a new light

FAIRFIELD – The Carnegie Historical Museum in Fairfield is nearly finished with a series of major upgrades to multiple display cases.

The museum had planned to show off the progress by hosting a Fairfield Area Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours event Friday, but that has been canceled due to the spike in COVID-19 cases in Iowa.

Dave Neff, a member of the museum board, said Tuesday the museum consulted with Jefferson County Health Administrator Chris Estle, who recommended postponing the event, which was to include a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tours of the museum.

'Our board will continue to monitor the status of the pandemic and, at an appropriate time in the future, we will reschedule these events for all to enjoy,” Neff said.

The museum has been closed to the public since March, allowing it to remodel a number of displays, particularly its taxidermy bird displays.

Therese Cummiskey, a former Jefferson County naturalist, joined the board last fall, and looked into consolidating the bird displays into one section of the museum. She sought to add interpretive information about each taxidermy subject or photograph.

In April, the museum foundation received funding from Iowa Audubon's 2020 small grants program to update the museum's bird displays. It also received funding from the Wilson B. Reynolds and Juanita E. Reynolds Fund to update each of the six bird display cases so they would tell a better story of the diversity of birds in the area, and thus enhance their use in education.

After a summer of remodeling and reconfiguring the displays, the birds are now together on the south side of the museum's third floor.

Carnegie Historical Museum Director Mark Shafer said that, before the renovations began, he asked the museum board to perform an exercise. He asked every member to supply two adjectives about how the museum makes them feel.

During discussion, Cummiskey remarked that she wanted to 'see old things in a new light.” That phrase stuck with Shafer, who feels the same way about the museum's artifacts.

'It's nice to see what I consider old friends in a new context,” he said. 'For instance, there are certain objects I never get tired of walking past. I never tire of looking at that hawk eating a passenger pigeon.”

The scene Shafer describes is among the taxidermy displays renovated at the museum, one of which is dedicated to the passenger pigeon.

'Here is an extinct species, the passenger pigeon, being used as a prop in taxidermy,” he said. 'It's a reminder of when that bird was huge, one of the largest groups of birds in the world, and now they're gone.”

Other noteworthy displays board members have been working on are the Iowa Wetland Birds display, complete with a mural painted by Fairfield resident Kathy Tollenare, an exhibit dedicated to Dr. Joshua Monroe Shaffer, who donated more than 400 pieces of taxidermy to the museum in 1893, a case of Iowa's endangered birds, a Victorian Parlor straight out of the 1890s, and a new display celebrating 100 years of Women's Suffrage, including local newspaper articles and cartoons from 1920.

One exhibit shows that a Fairfield newspaper ran a story in 1920 asking residents about the prospect of a female mayor. Exactly a century later, Connie Boyer assumed the duties of Fairfield's mayor, the first woman to do so in the town's history.

Shafer said the renovations that have taken place this past spring and summer are the most extensive at the museum since the 1970s.