Remembering Roadside America: Preserving the Past as Landscape and Place

5. Historical Museums and Roadside America

CHAPTER FIVE HISTORICAL MUSEUMS AND ROADSIDE AMERICA Modernism’s penchant for discard was nowhere more evident than along America’s highways. If early Roadside America little lent itself to the actions of preservationists, then what about the collector’s instincts? And, better still, the instincts of the museum curator? Remnants of the past traditionally accumulated in the nation’s antique shops, to be sold to enthusiasts personally enamored of one or another aspect of historicity. Historical relics were likewise collected in museums to be publicly celebrated, not just for the lessons they might teach about the past, but also for their rarity as curiosities. From the gathering and display of things that could be held in the hand, the collector’s instinct as a force for conservation steadily evolved in scale—from that of the large machine (automobiles and trucks included), to the scale of the building (from log cabins to gasoline stations, for example), to the scale of the built environment (such as a roadside). To date, however, outdoor museums in the United States rarely celebrate landscapes of automobility. As architectural ensembles they celebrate almost exclusively pre-automobile themes—for example, frontier pioneering, traditional family farming, or life as lived along the Main Streets of small-town America. Indeed, outdoor museums in the United States are often rationalized as a means of remembering life here before automobility; the coming of the motorcar and motor truck is rendered symbolic of the very coming of modernism itself. When and where will the auto age with its roadside landscapes enter the world of the American outdoor museum? 134 Historical Museums and Roadside America Museum Preconceptions in the United States American museums originated in the Victorian ethos of consistently progressive societal improvement, with life collectively getting ever better and with the calm assurance that the past was knowable, a dimension understood by means of objective analysis in archived documents. With such a positive spirit, it is perhaps understandable that museums have celebrated the grand American accomplishment in its many forms. Throughout the twentieth century, accumulated doubts withered the faith in progress and eventually a belief not only in a single knowable past, recoverable for everyone, but a yen for entertainment. Public education endured as the museum’s mission, to be sure, but each visitor’s understanding of self continually became more important. In this radical flux, a roadside museum came to have a greater likelihood of appearing. It did not seem so for many years. In fact the very traits of mobility and the value of ceaseless novelty were at essential odds with how museums habitually portrayed the past. Beginning with the Renaissance’s assumptions, museums in the Western world, the United States included, labored with them until well into the twentieth century. The very word of origin, musaeum, derived partly from the word muses, predicated the belief that studied experts wisely collected and arranged displays for an unknowing public who would be uplifted in a learning experience . The studios wherein early collectors gathered their holdings and theaters wherein the surprising discoveries of the early modern age were on display made the museum that combined these functions into an enclosed space implying completeness . Museums were places where the entirety of ever-growing knowledge through collections was rendered complete. Europe’s encounter with new forms of life in the New World during the 1500s and 1600s further ensured the role of the museum. Men almost exclusively dominated in the collecting and creation of museums, and the process became one of self-promotion, transferred from private interests into public benefaction. That museums manifest a constructed narrative of the past is inherent. Under these terms the first public museum was founded in Bologna, Italy, in the early eighteenth century; this was the Instituto della Scienze in 1714.1 Defined, contained, patriarchal and didactic, the museum came to America narrowly circumscribed in meaning. Museums took hold there beginning in the late eighteenth century; the first public one, the Charleston Museum, in Charleston, South Carolina, antedated the nation’s founding by three years.2 The long duration of museums in the United Historical Museums and Roadside America 135 States notwithstanding, the precise definition of terms and widely shared selfconscious participation in a tradition went lacking until comparatively recently. In the 1970s William Alderson and Shirley Low, two museums practitioners seeking to raise the intellectual bar, decried the absence of general principles governing historic site interpretation.3...