Honeycutt

When you hear the word museum, what is the first thing you think of? It’s my favorite question to ask people, especially the field-trip kids who fill the Besser Museum every spring. For many of them, it’s one of the first museums they’ve ever visited, and their answers are pretty consistent: “old,” “fossils,” and “history.”

They’re not wrong.

Most adults think of the same things, although they’re often a little more specific. Instead of simply thinking “old,” they imagine glass cases filled with rare and unusual objects and rows of scientific specimens. It’s the classic “cabinet of curiosities” look that has shaped our idea of museums for generations.

After all, those cabinets of curiosity were the original inspiration for the museums we have today. They first appeared during the Renaissance, when European exploration and global trade brought “curiosities” like exotic plants, animals, minerals, and cultural objects back from around the world. Wealthy collectors displayed these rare and unusual items to showcase both their worldly knowledge and their status. Over time, those private collections were opened to the public, evolving into the first museums.

As someone who works behind the scenes caring for museum collections, I spend a lot of time thinking about how those early cabinets of curiosity shaped the museums we have today. The question always on my mind is this: Can a museum capture the classic feel of a cabinet of curiosity while still offering a modern museum experience?

If you ever visited the Besser Museum before 2023, you may remember the exhibit created by Alpena historian and museum curator Robert Haltiner. The exhibit showcased the expansive collection of Native American artifacts collected by Robert and his father, Gerald Haltiner. It was a permanent fixture at the museum for more than 50 years and was well loved. Visitors stepped into the room, looked around at case after case filled with artifacts, and simply stopped in awe.

Unfortunately, nothing good lasts forever, and the exhibit began to show its age. It was time for a change.

Looking back on it now, I realize the thing people loved most about that old exhibit is the same thing they love about a cabinet of curiosity. It isn’t the carefully researched museum text or the labels. It’s the unique feeling of wonder you experience when you step into a room surrounded by hundreds of rare objects–literally surrounded by history. Usually, the greater the number of objects, the stronger that feeling becomes.

However, as we began planning the new exhibit, we faced a challenge that museums everywhere wrestle with. Modern museum exhibits often favor displaying fewer objects. Experience has shown that simply exhibiting as many artifacts as possible doesn’t necessarily make an exhibit better. Too many objects can overwhelm visitors instead of helping them connect with the stories behind them. Our old exhibit leaned heavily toward the artifacts themselves. We wanted the new exhibit to tell richer stories while still preserving that unmistakable feeling of discovery.

Choosing which artifacts would stay wasn’t easy. We worked closely with exhibit designers and content experts, including Tim Kent, who knew the Haltiner Collection better than anyone else (except, perhaps, Haltiner himself). Every planning meeting involved a little give and take. There was always a push by Kent to see if we could squeeze in just a few more artifacts, while the designers reminded us that every object needed room to breathe. Strangely enough, one phrase kept coming up again and again: “cabinet of curiosity.” It became the best way for us to describe the feeling we were trying to preserve to the exhibit designers.

When the exhibit opened in January 2025, visitors were welcomed on a chronological journey through eleven periods of Northeast Michigan’s history, all within a 3,000-square-foot gallery that had once housed only the Native American exhibit. They see the finished product, but not the countless hours of meetings, revisions, and compromises that made it possible to fit so much history into the limited space we had.

At the heart of the new exhibit is what we like to call the “Prehistoric Room.” That’s where you’ll find the Haltiner Collection displayed in a space that still captures the spirit of a cabinet of curiosity. The cases may be arranged differently than they were 50 years ago, but they’re still filled with enough artifacts to make visitors stop and stare.

I saw that happen recently when my three-year-old nephew visited the museum. He can’t read the exhibit labels yet, and he barely glanced at the text panels. Instead, he walked into the room, looked around at the hundreds of artifacts surrounding him, stopped in his tracks, and quietly said, “Whoa.”

To me, that’s proof we got it right. Especially considering there is a kids slide only a few feet away from the “Prehistoric Room”.

The new exhibit contains nearly 4,000 artifacts, with glass cases to marvel at and 46 artifact drawers waiting to be opened and explored. We may have built a modern exhibit, but I’m glad we managed to keep a little bit of that centuries-old cabinet of curiosity alive.

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.