True Tales From Sulphur Springs: Remembering The Little Museum

NOTE: I learned yesterday of the passing, in 2002, of Mike Mayfield, former director of the Hillsborough County Museum, the forerunner of the institution now known as Tampa's Museum Of Science & Industry, or MOSI. In some ways Mike was a tragic figure, and I'll devote a post to him and his ill-starred tenure as museum director at a later date. This reminiscence describes how I came to work at the little museum by the river, and what I found there.

1974 I applied for work at the Hillsborough County Museum in Tampa. My girlfriend preceded me there; she had a summer job teaching art to innercity kids. One day she mentioned that the Exhibits Department needed a temporary laborer, preferably one that could swing a hammer. I didn’t know beans about carpentry, but I was sick of driving a cab, so I gave it a shot.

For reasons I don’t recall, my interview took place on the museum grounds around midnight. It was pitch dark, and although we couldn’t actually see each other, the Exhibits Coordinator said I had an “amicable aura”, and I got the job. I kind of liked my title: “Journeyman Helper”.

The museum was on the north bank of the Hillsborough River in Sulphur Springs, a site now occupied by the county's Parks and Recreation Department. At that time there were ten buildings. Three had once been homes; the rest were portables, storage sheds, or renovated garages. About half had recently been converted to exhibit space. Appalachian quilts, antique toys, Native American artwork, and duck decoys from the Louisiana bayou were among the shows slated for the coming year, to be rented or borrowed from other museums or private collectors. For the next several months the staff struggled to meet a rigorous schedule of openings. When not building pedestals and display cases I policed the grounds, picking up trash with a pointed stick.

Just as my temporary job was ending, the Museum’s “Acting Curator of Collections” -the Property Control Clerk- resigned. I took a Civil Service exam, and took his place.

As the new Property Control Clerk/Acting Curator, my first task was to conduct a museum-wide inventory, to see what we had and how we were handling it.

Boxes of artifacts and ephemera were stashed in attics, in closets, and under buildings, exposed to the elements. Some of the most interesting, and oddest, pieces were on display, but most were stockpiled at another location, on the top floor of an old warehouse in what’s now the Channel District. Only a few items had been catalogued, by someone to whom English was at best a second language.

Most of the collections had no reliable provenance, only rumors and hearsay. A beaded buckskin wedding dress was purported to have belonged to a friend of Annie Oakley’s. My ornately carved desk was said to have once been John Ringling’s. Underneath my office in Building 7 were several grocery bags full of human bones, said to have been “salvaged” (plundered) from an Indian burial mound.

Conditions were worse -much worse- in our downtown warehouse. Objects were stacked on rickety shelves, or heaped on the floor. The place was an oven; a recording thermometer read 95 degrees at 6:00 AM. The relative humidity hovered at an arid 50 per cent, good for preserving dried fruit or beef jerky, but injurious to sensitive artifacts of wood, cloth, bone, and paper.

The inventory revealed an eclectic assemblage of thousands upon thousands of THINGS- fossils, curios, rocks, relics, antiques, and assorted objets d’art. There were stuffed animals, model trains, fake shrunken heads, handpainted Ukranian Easter eggs, old tools, a medieval Spanish breastplate, a massive amethyst geode, a matched pair of mastodon tusks. There were the original plans for the presidential palace of Nicaragua, ca. 1915, and boxes of butterflies collected in South America in the 1920s. There was a rich trove of American Indian artifacts, woven baskets, ceramic bowls, bows and arrows, lacrosse sticks, cradleboards, kachina dolls, and delicately stitched leather goods decorated with porcupine quills and tiny glass beads.

And there were other surprises -some of them downright alarming. Rummaging around, I found a liter of mercury, and a rusty can full of highly explosive ether. Next to that was some fused sand wrapped in a bit of lead foil. A scribbled note said it was from ground zero at an atomic bomb test site. I disposed of the ether, and stored the rest as safely I could.

I was acutely aware that I was embarassingly ignorant, and lacked the skills and education needed to manage such a potpourri. I requested training, and the museum obliged, sending me to the Smithsonian for classes in collections conservation, and the Florida State Museum for a lengthy seminar on the preservation of fossils. Most importantly, I was encouraged to network with other museum professionals across the country. Then we obtained a grant for a team of college students, from various disciplines, to catalogue and conserve the bulk of the permanent collections. Carolyn Byers, Peter Owens, Robert Peterson, Loretta Hennessey, Bruce Bollman, Bertram Crawford, and Robert Soler toiled diligently for a year, documenting tens of thousands of items, preserving arcane and puzzling bits and pieces of Tampa’s legacy. If not for their combined efforts, which largely went unrecognized, many irreplaceable objects would surely have been lost.

It was understood from the beginning that our work at the Hillsborough County Museum was in preparation for a bigger, more modern facility. In 1977 the new museum was finally approved. More personnel were added, and Mike Mayfield was replaced, without forewarning, with a new director. We broke ground on MOSI in 1979, and I was privileged to work -and play- there for many years.

But it’s my time at the little museum that holds meaning for me now. Recently I went back, after almost three decades, and strolled around the grounds. Three of the original buildings are gone, and the rest are mostly office space. Still, it looked much the same. How odd to think that an institution like MOSI could have its roots here, on this shaded riverbank, in a decaying neighborhood the city has forgotten.