Creating Old World Wisconsin: The Struggle to Build an Outdoor History Museum of Ethnic Architecture

Introduction

3 h Intro­duc­tion This is the story of a few individuals who struggled to fulfill a vision. The Wisconsin vision entailed salvaging fast disappearing artifacts by relocating them to a protected environment. Nothing surprising, except that in this case the artifacts were houses, shops, barns, and a variety of outbuildings. Individuals—State Historical Society of Wisconsin (SHSW) staff and volunteers who worked under the umbrella of state government—labored to save a small portion of Wisconsin’s vanishing migrant and immigrant heritage.1 These visionaries initiated a massive intervention that I describe as “salvage architecture.” This term parallels salvage archaeology, where archaeologists rush to collect data and material in advance of the destruction of the site. Salvaging structures that were no longer viable on their original locations defined the vision.2 What did the word “heritage” mean to Wisconsin’s visionaries? Although they never defined it or delved into its meaning, they were not sentimentalists seeking to glorify the past for a present-day illusion. Heritage, as Ned Kaufman noted, “is a slippery word.” Heritage conservation , the term used throughout the world, equated to historic preservation in the United States. Kaufman’s description of tangible heritage, that is, objects and buildings, seems to define the visionaries’ immediate preservation goals. Indeed, if they gave little thought as to how the buildings they sought to save might be used (the intangible heritage), 4 H introduction they never wavered from their goal to preserve and celebrate the state’s ethnic diversity.3 They did not, as later critic David Lowenthal would, distinguish between heritage, a term he admitted “all but defies definition ,” and history. History “is the past that actually happened, heritage is partisan perversion, the past manipulated for some present aim.” These visionaries saw saving a portion of the state’s ethnic heritage as synonymous with preserving its past. Heritage for the Wisconsin visionaries was the tangible past, a past that would have been lost without a massive intervention.4 As they pondered their museum, the visionaries had three models to consider. The first model preserved buildings in their original location. Examples included Colonial Williamsburg and Old Salem in WinstonSalem , North Carolina. The second model preserved buildings by removing them from their original sites to a new setting. Examples of the open-air museum based on relocation included Greenfield Village, Old Sturbridge Village, and the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York. The third model relied exclusively on reconstructed buildings. These included sites such as Lincoln’s New Salem and Historic St. Mary’s City. Given the scattered nature of building survival in the state, Wisconsin visionaries had no choice but to adopt the relocation model.5 They embraced an increasingly popular post–World War II concept, that of the open-air museum. This was a place, as Candice Tangorra Matelic noted, where “buildings not only house the collections, but are the collection.”6 In contrast to many of its well-known predecessors— Mount Vernon, Monticello, Greenfield Village, and Colonial Williamsburg—Wisconsin’s visionaries did not focus on great men who profoundly changed the course of American history. Wisconsin also lacked the “highly developed architecture forms” that populated the eastern regions of the United States. Wisconsin’s nineteenth-century buildings seemed “old fashioned,” and, with few exceptions, were buildings that would not necessarily attract tourist interest. Built and occupied by “foreigners” in the second half of the nineteenth century, these structures reflected no great architectural themes. In the face of “a frenzy of modernization”7 in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Wisconsin’s visionaries planned to save a portion of the vernacular architecture of the state’s inhabitants. As they did, they also embraced another emerging concept, namely, landscape preservation and landscape reconstruction.8 Similar to the great European models and places like Greenfield Village, Old Sturbridge Village, and the Farmers’ Museum, the Wisconsin vision called for buildings to be relocated. In introduction h 5 its most innovative form, the visionaries also imagined the buildings relocated on landscapes that approximated the original locations. This kind of daring thinking extended the scope of the project. This, in turn, raised the thorny issue as to whether SHSW had the requisite resources to accomplish its grand vision.9 Migrants and immigrants found the area now known as Wisconsin inviting, and they helped to define its history. Before the Europeans came, this area was home to diverse peoples. From the end...