Celebrate 160 Years of the State Historical Society of Iowa
Imagine a few of Iowa’s first pioneers gathering by the fireside in the fall of 1856, while outside a crisp breeze hinted at the harsh winter that would come soon. Well past middle age, they’re swapping stories about how they crossed half a continent to make new lives here on the Iowa prairie.
These sturdy pioneers conquered the frontier with axes and plows as they staked out homesteads. They poured sweat and blood into the soil and raised livestock along with their families. They even tangled with Congress about proposed state boundaries in 1845 and cheered when Iowa joined the Union in 1846 as “the only free child of the Missouri Compromise.”
They were proud of the great Commonwealth which they had founded. The marvelous transformations which they had witnessed stirred their imaginations. They felt that somehow their own humble lives were really a part of history; and so they resolved ‘to rescue from oblivion the memory of their early pioneers. Thrice fathers — fathers of the Frontier, fathers of the Territory, fathers of the State — the unschooled pioneers of Iowa now became the fathers of our local provincial history.’ — Benjamin Shambaugh in “A Brief History of the State Historical Society of Iowa, 1857–1907.”
Starting the collection in Iowa City
Thankfully, those pioneers had the wisdom and foresight to create the State Historical Society of Iowa in February 1857. They urged Iowans to collect artifacts and documents about our state’s earliest years.
Located in Iowa City, the society was led by future governors Samuel Kirkwood and James Grimes along with other prominent eastern Iowans. The General Assembly, meeting for the last time at the Old Capitol before moving to Des Moines that year, approved an annual appropriation of $250 to help the group develop its collection.
It didn’t take long for the society members to act. They organized in March and invited the public to donate manuscripts, letters, journals and biographies. They wanted materials documenting Indian tribes and their history. They asked for newspapers, books, pamphlets, publications, catalogs, coins, medals, paintings, portraits, statuary, engravings, topographical drawings and more.
By the end of the society’s first year, its collection included newspapers, pamphlets, books, daguerreotypes and “a very choice collection of Maps and Charts of the State,” according to its first annual report.
By 1865 the society was located in the Old Capitol, and its collection included portraits of Iowa’s first territorial governor, Robert Lucas, painted by Geo. H. Yewell of Iowa City, and former Governor R. P. Lowe, painted by Yewell’s student, Almira Reeder Dayton of Muscatine.
The society began publishing “The Annals of Iowa,” “Iowa Historical Record” and various pamphlets. It was busy collecting more newspapers and state documents, including a complete set of Iowa laws from 1836 to 1864, as well as journals from the legislature and the state’s Constitutional Conventions of 1844, 1846 and 1857.
Over the next three decades, the society strengthened its bonds with the University of Iowa as a resource for scholarly and academic research.
In 1900, the scholar Benjamin Shambaugh took over leadership of the society until his death in 1940. During his tenure, he also served as chairman of the University of Iowa’s political science department and promoted public archives and historical publications while supporting the development of professional organizations for historians and political scientists.
Eventually, in about 1960, the society’s collection of books, newspapers, manuscripts, photographs and artifacts were relocated from Schaeffer Hall on the University of Iowa campus to its current location in the Centennial Building at 402 Iowa Ave.
Building another collection in Des Moines
Running parallel to the developments in Iowa City, Charles Aldrich arrived in Iowa in 1857 and started the “Hamilton Freeman” newspaper. He became chief clerk of the Iowa House of Representatives in 1860 and was elected to the house in 1881.
During that time, he and his wife, Matilda Williams, had been collecting a large and valuable collection of manuscripts, portraits, books and autograph letters of famous individuals, which they donated to the state in 1884.
The Aldrich donation eventually became the core of the Iowa Historical Collection established by the legislature in 1892. Located in Des Moines, the collection grew in size and stature when it acquired bird specimens, American Indian baskets and an important collection of southwestern American Indian pottery from the Smithsonian Institution.
Later in 1892, the state established the Department of History and Archives in Des Moines to oversee the collection and make it available to the public. During that time, the department began collecting natural history specimens, aboriginal pottery, small arms, shot and shell from the Rock Island arsenal, prehistoric stone implements, minerals, corals and much more.
At the same time, it was also gathering books, newspapers, photographs, manuscripts and diaries in addition to histories of Civil War regiments from Iowa and across the country.
By the mid-1890s, however, the collection had outgrown its space in the Capitol Building. State officials developed plans to build a modest Beaux Arts building at E. 11th Street and Grand Avenue in Des Moines.
Construction of the Historical, Memorial and Arts Building began in 1899 and tripled in size until it was completed in 1910. Known informally as the Iowa Historical Building, it housed the Department of History and Archives and the State Library for eight decades. Today, it is known as the Ola Babcock Miller Building, in honor of Iowa’s first female secretary of state.
Meskwaki adoptee Edgar Harlan
After Aldrich died, in 1908, the department grew by leaps and bounds under the guidance of a curator named Edgar Harlan.
In the February 1910 edition of “The Midwestern” magazine, Harlan reported more than 50,000 people from all walks of life visited the historical building in the previous year.
“On the same day I accompanied the president of the American Bar Association and a man who shoveled coal at the Des Moines Gas Works, a savant from Massachusetts consulting our John Brown objects was one day jostled by an Italian-American flagman,” he said.
Visitors were greeted by frescoes that had hung in the Capitol Building’s Iowa Supreme Court room and seven cabinets of the Aldrich Collection, including 192 drawers filled with autographs. Other highlights included rare editions of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and 70 years of letters and documents of Iowa lawmakers, Abraham Lincoln, Gen. T.H. Sherman, Henry Clay and James Monroe. They also could see the original receipt for the burial expenses of Chief Wapello and four scrolls embellished by the brush of Tsi Ann, the late empress of China.
The building also offered trophy artillery pieces from the walls of Vicksburg, Havana and Pekin; an old Western stage coach and a prairie schooner; firearms from Iowa’s earliest pioneers; swords, pistols, canteens, flags and relics from the Civil War; and much more including thousands of books and documents in the library and archives.
Harlan’s interests leaned toward early pioneer history, the Mormon Trail and personal biographies of Iowans and authors. But he was especially focused on the Indians of Iowa, particularly the Meskwaki. He was adopted as a member of the tribe in the 1920s and expanded the department’s collection of Meskwaki history along with significant acquisitions for the museum’s American Indian collections.
Harlan also expanded the collection’s natural history holdings when he hired taxidermist Joseph Steppan, whose mounted specimens of native Iowa animals have thrilled young students for nearly 100 years.
‘Mountain man’ Jack Musgrove
Jack Musgrove began his tenure at the Iowa Historical Building in 1938 as a technician and became head of the department in 1960.
He and his wife, Mary, were avid, if not fanatical, collectors of wildlife specimens, such as fish fossils, and artifacts, including Indian pottery, duck decoys and Kentucky rifles.
Bill Johnson, a former State Historical Society of Iowa administrator and curator, described Jack as a unique and capable director, “a mountain man set in the twentieth century. He didn’t wear a beard or buckskins but he had the knowledge and the abilities.”
But by the late 1970s, Musgrove had had enough. The museum, library and archive collections had outgrown the Iowa Historical Building and were busting at the seams.
The museum was filled to capacity 40 years ago when he took over, Musgrove says, and since then the collection remnants of the state’s history has doubled. Some smaller exhibits are hung behind larger ones — invisible to the eye of the youngster on a field trip. Even worse, other exhibits are slowly being destroyed by nature. Because the building … has no climate or humidity control — as do modern museums — paintings, soldiers’ uniforms and countless other exhibits slowly rot away. — The Des Moines Sunday Register, Aug. 21, 1977.
Musgrove never retired. He continued at the Iowa Historical Building until he passed away in 1980. A major portion of Jack and Mary’s personal collection was donated to the society in 2003.
A building of ‘relative permanence’
In 1974 the original State Historical Society of Iowa (in Iowa City), the State Department of History and Archives (in Des Moines), and the State Historic Preservation Office (in Iowa City) merged into one organization called the State Historical Department.
But again, space for artifacts, documents and other materials was scarce at the Iowa Historical Building. Items were being stored on dirt floors in a sub-basement, and the building lacked adequate temperature and humidity controls to protect the collection from deterioration. And decades of exposure to coal dust, tobacco smoke and sunlight certainly didn’t help.
In 1982 the roadbuilder Glenn “Grover” Herrick left about $5 million to the state “for the purchase or construction of one or more public improvements of relative permanence.”
Prompted by the gift, Gov. Terry Branstad recommended using gambling revenues to provide additional funding for constructing a new historical building, which the legislature approved. The Iowa Historical Museum Foundation raised the remaining funds, and construction on the new State Historical Building began.
In 1986, the State Historical Department was rebranded as the State Historical Society of Iowa and folded into the newly created Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, along with the Iowa Arts Council.
In December 1987, Iowa opened the 220,000-square-foot granite and glass State Historical Building as a symbol of the state’s pride in its past and faith in its future. It is the only building on the Capitol Complex built without tax dollars.
Today, the State Historical Society of Iowa continues to preserve and protect our state’s history through the State Historical Museum of Iowa, State Records Center, State Research Centers in Des Moines and Iowa City, State Historic Preservation Office, and eight historic sites across the state. All told, the society preserves and provides access to more than 200 million pieces of Iowa history.
And just think: It all started with a few folks in the fall of 1856.
So happy birthday to the society. Here’s to 160 years of history — and at least 160 more.
— Jeff Morgan, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs
Sources:
“A Brief History of the State Historical Society of Iowa, 1857–1907,” Benjamin Shambaugh.
“Looking Back,” Legislative Services Agency.
Iowa Historian, Summer 2003, Vol. 17, No. 3.
Circular of the State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City, June 1858.
Iowa Official Register, 1963–1964.
Twenty-fifth Biennial Report of the Iowa State Department of History and Archives, June 30, 1940.
Iowa Official Register, 1979–1980.
First Annual Report of the State Historical Society of Iowa, 1857.
Fifth Biennial Report of the Board of Curators of the State Historical Society, Dec. 1, 1865.
Iowa Historian, Aug. 1987, Vol. 1, No. 4.
State Historical Department, Third Biennial Report, Nov. 1, 1897.
