Aug
12

Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios

Dr. William L. Bird in front of the pedestal of the statue of Joan of Arc at Riverside Drive and 93rd Street. The pedestal is inset with stones from her dungeon, and a stone fragment is in his exhibition. (Photo by Billy Bird/New York Times)

Dr. William L. Bird in front of the pedestal of the statue of Joan of Arc at Riverside Drive and 93rd Street. The pedestal is inset with stones from her dungeon, and a stone fragment is in his exhibition. (Photo by Billy Bird/New York Times)

This article by Sandy Keenan was originally published online by The New York Times as “Toys and Bits from the Attic” on August 7, 2013.

A curious mishmash is about to go on display in Washington. Among the items: a bagful of chads formerly hanging from Broward County, Fla., presidential election voting ballots; snippets of Rutherford B. Hayes’s hair; and a chestnut from Mount Vernon embedded with a tiny compass.

“Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes and Curios from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History”

opens Aug. 9 at the Smithsonian Castle in Schermer Hall and runs through 2014; a companion book was published in May by Princeton Architectural Press ($24.95). Both are the work of William L. Bird Jr., 62, curator of the museum’s political history collection, who clearly has an eccentric’s eye: among his many previous books is one about the paint-by-number craze.

Dr. Bird does not claim great importance for this assemblage of mainly pocket-size artifacts collected by mainly regular citizens. In a recent telephone interview, he said that much of what he chose are “unclaimed items” that do not really belong in the museum to begin with. “We have this little sugar-cube-sized piece of metal from the Bastille,” he said. “It’s not significant. You can’t tell anything about the Bastille from it, and yet someone took the time to secure it and had that level of intensity, that longing to connect with a thing.”

Q. What makes these objects worth displaying?

A. What we’re trying to show is the level of personal connection in plain, ordinary things. As nondescript and insignificant as they may be, these objects generally didn’t come to the museum until the death of the person who collected it, which shows how much the experience of having it meant to the owner.

With such personal souvenirs, do you worry about the provenance, or do you have to make a leap of faith?

I started out with a couple of hundred things. I had to whittle them down to 50 for the book and, as it turned out, about 28 for the exhibit. There were some that surprised me and were legitimate when I checked them out. There were others where the stories attached to the item did not match up with actual events.

One example was a John C. Breckinridge compass. He was the vice president under James Buchanan, who ran for president in 1860 in a four-way race and lost. He joined the Confederacy. There was a handwritten note that came with the compass that said, “This is John C. Breckinridge’s compass which he used in escaping to Mexico from the Confederate States after their cause was lost.” But in a simple search of his story, we learned that Breckinridge actually escaped from Florida to Cuba.

What is your most treasured personal keepsake?

When I was a boy, I spent delightful afternoons with my grandmother in her Washington, D.C., neighborhood. On the way to a playground, we’d go by a construction site and I liked the shiny quartz rocks, so I took one and wrote my name on it in pencil. I was 7. She kept it in a mug she’d bought as a girl at the British Museum before moving to this country in 1912 from Scotland. My rock was in the mug with a handwritten note from her with the details of her own childhood relic.

What is considered the golden age of relic hunting in this country?

I’d say from the 1880s to the 1920s. But after that, the museum began taking a dim view of these kind of souvenirs. Historic preservation came into vogue then, and this sort of scavenging was discouraged. There were new groupings and ways of sorting collections. Most of these items just remained in the legacy collection — like a bathtub ring of the not claimed and never taken. That’s why we have Napoleon’s napkin. It actually makes it kind of fun.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)


Posted: 12 August 2013
About the Author:

The Torch relies on contributions from the entire Smithsonian community.