Honeycutt

The Besser Museum for Northeast Michigan celebrated its 60th birthday this past May. It sent me down a rabbit hole of old museum photos taken in 1966. Something in those early images kept grabbing my attention: the emptiness.

Sixty years later, our collection has grown to more than 40,000 artifacts and continues to expand. Empty space like that would be the dream right about now.

It made me curious. What was the first artifact donation that filled those empty galleries in 1966?

Luckily, museums love paperwork. Every donation is carefully documented and assigned an accession number. The Besser Museum has used the same numbering system since 1966. It consists of two numbers, first the year and then the sequential number it arrived in.

So, I followed the paper trail all the way back to accession number 1966.1. There I found the very first artifact donation in Besser Museum’s history.

Accession 1966.1 consisted of a large and eclectic donation of more than 750 artifacts; all connected in some way to Alpena’s history. Curious about where such a vast collection had come from, I dug deeper into the hefty stack of paperwork. There, buried under the 750+ catalog records of every artifact, I found it, the provenance.

Provenance is a record of an artifact’s life story. It tells us who owned it, where it’s been, and how it ended up in the museum. To me, the provenance is usually more exciting than the artifact itself. And it is often the biggest deciding factor on whether the museum accepts an artifact.

The most intriguing part? Where it all came from. The collection originated from one person, Richard E. Wilson. Wilson joined the Alpena Fire Department in 1908 as a driver. That was back when the department relied on horse-drawn fire wagons. By 1914, he became Chief Wilson and held that position until his retirement in

1946. During his thirty-eight years of service, he saw tremendous change in the fire department. It grew from a small group of regulars to a full-time force of twenty-two firefighters. And those horse-drawn wagons he started off with soon became fire trucks.

However, he was more than a fire chief. He was also a historian that loved collecting curios and relics of early Alpena. As his collection grew, he shared it with his community in what might be Alpena’s first museum. This is the point where the rabbit hole sucked me in, because how had I never heard of this museum before?

The biggest question in my mind, where was it located? This is when all that museum paperwork really starts to pay off. After all, museums don’t love paperwork and documentation because it is fun (it isn’t). It is because proper documentation preserves their stories for future generations. Luckily, the museum staff in 1966 did their due diligence. They saved an Alpena News article from 1937 titled “Council Seeks Site for City Museum.”

Right away, the article answered my biggest question. It explained that what they called Chief Wilson’s little museum began as a display inside No. 1 Fire Station. That was not too surprising, considering who the curator was.

The article made it clear that the community valued what Chief Wilson had created, but the collection was quickly outgrowing the space. A fire station was also not the safest place to display such valuable items. In fact, the city asked an expert from the Smithsonian Institution to assess the collection’s value. According to the article, the expert estimated it was worth thousands of dollars and highlighted the area’s coral fossils as “exceptional.”

As a result, city officials began discussing better options for the display. One idea was to place display cases in the courthouse as a temporary solution while hoping to find a permanent home in a future public building, such as the library.

Did that ever happen? I don’t know. Unfortunately, the 1937 article was where my paper trail ended. Believe me, I could have kept digging deeper. But I had already set aside my paperwork long enough, and none of it was going to finish itself.

I find it fitting that our first donation led to an even earlier effort to preserve Alpena’s history. If only Chief Wilson could see the museum today. Some of his artifacts are still on display, including those “exceptional” fossils. It might also amaze him (and the early museum staff) that what we do not have exhibit space for we can now share online. You can check it out for yourself by visiting bessermuseum.catalogaccess.com. I add new things to the database daily. Recently, I even added a photo of Chief R.E. Wilson. The photo captures him posing in his fire uniform standing in a doorway. To the right of him, is part of a shadow box full of stone arrow points. My guess? Well, that is Wilson standing next to what he started, which was, Alpena’s first museum.

Sarah Honeycutt is the Collections Manager at the Besser Museum for Northeast Michigan, where she cares for a collection of more than 40,000 artifacts. She enjoys sharing the stories behind the collection and offering readers a glimpse into the work of preserving Northeast Michigan’s history.