Historic Landmark to Museum / Visitor Center We Have a Lot At Stake Here

By Pauline Masson

Funding and operating a museums Is a testament to government / citizen collaboration. I know more about this now than I did last week since Dennis Oliver responded to my post about how museums are managed.

You can thank Dennis, chair of the Meramec Valley Historical Society that helps to manage the City of Pacific Visitor Center and Museum in the historic Red Cedar Inn building for this post.

In response to my report on the funding of museums where I quoted a national museum expert, Dennis said, “This is great info, my only question is how many of the museums he is talking about are under the control of a taxing entity?”

That caught me up short. My first thought was that I didn’t go far enough in my earlier research; I had to start over. It turns out that most of the museums I dug into are operated by a coalition of government and citizen overseers that combine their responsibilities and authority to keep their doors open, the crowds visiting and their exhibits growing.

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Even the mighty Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, aka The Met, the largest and most visited museum in the world, with its $300 million budget and 490,000 works of art, is operated by NYC government and an army of private overseers

The City of New York owns the building and provides the utilities, heat, and some of the cost of building management. The collections are owned by a private corporation of fellows and benefactors which totals about 950 people. The day to day operation of the museum is governed by a board of trustees of 41 elected members, several officials of the City of New York, and persons honored as trustees by the museum.

This alliance of government and citizens, who are hailed by news organizations as the elite of the city, compete to be part of this illustrious group. It’s a really big deal to be associated with The Met. These patrons and art connoisseurs mask any discontent or disagreement with each other wth lavish dinner parties, testimonials and awards banquets, attended by scores of photographers and TV cameras, meant to keep their names in the public and to impress everyone that they are all part of a worthy enterprise.

Closer to home museum operations are no less complex. _______________________________________________________________________________________

Missouri – The Missouri History Museum in Forest Park, which showcases Missouri history was built in 1913 with profits from the 1904 World’s Fair. 

The fair, itself, had a funding and management scheme to rival The Met.

The fair was funded by local, state, and federal grants totaling $15 million (equivalent to $509 million in 2023). The fair grounds were built and operated by an eight-member board of commissioners, appointed by the St Louis mayor and the Missouri governor.

The Missouri History Museum they built with World’s Fair profits managed to keep its doors open for almost 70 years before it became obvious that it was running out of money to pay the staff and maintain the building.

In 1980, the citizens of St. Louis City and St. Louis County voted to include the History Museum in the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District (ZMD) and in 1987 the museum began receiving sales tax revenue.

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Churchill – Another history group that resurrected an old building to create a modern museum, which could give us Pacific worriers pause, is the National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri.

This museum building was a rescue project of Westminster College when they decided to honor Winston Churchill, who made his famous Iron Curtain speech at the college in 1946. They turned to the ruins of St. Mary the Virgin Aldermanbury Church that Churchill had actually attended, which had stood in London since 1677. The building was typical of Sir Christopher Wren who combined arches, pediments, circle windows,, towers and cupolas. The beautiful church and was badly damaged during the London Blitz. The college packed up the church ruins stone by stone, moved it to Westminster’s campus in Fulton and rebuilt it to Sir Christopher Wren’s original specifications.

The building is owned by the college. The museum relies almost entirely on private support. But it’s no small means. Three donor societies sustain the Museum through annual membership contributions of $1,000, $2,500, $5,000, $10,000, or $25,000. __________________________________________________________________________________________

Lincoln – In another midwestern museum, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum – the largest presidential museum in the U.S. – is located in the state capital of  Springfield, Illinois and is overseen as an agency of the state government. 

But government funding is a tricky business, dependent on the economy and taxes collected. 

When the Lincoln Museum operation cost began to skyrocket, Illinois First Lady Lura Lynn Ryan became a major fundraiser. She launched a Library fundraising campaign by raising $250,000. She also organized a program in which Illinois school children collected pennies for the presidential library, which raised $47,000.

This little snippet about the children collecting pennies for the museum hit close to home, reminiscent of Zitzman Elementary Students selling Valentine candy grams to help Helen Preiss build the Tri-County Senior Center.

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The reason all this is on my mind, and I can’t just “give it a break,” as Pat Smiley recently suggested on social media, is because our community has lot at stake here.

We have an iconic historic building that as Henry Hahn reminded us the city has already invested a mint of combined grant and citizen tax money to repurpose the old Route 66 eatery into a local history museum.

No matter what you think about the visitor center/museum, its hard to escape the reality that this is Pacific history.

We need to look beyond the multi-million dollar museums I used as examples. It’s only numbers. Government and citizen collaberation is a challenge of give and take, dispute and compromise. Everybody doesn’t get what they want. But the end result is almost sure to be better than just waiting – and maybe hoping – for something to fail.

So, Dennis, I’m thinking that we as a community have the talent comparable to those fancy people in New York, Springfield and Fulton to use the same government / citizen cooperation to maintain and grow the Red Cedar as a symbol of Pacific.

Why wouldn’t we welcome Tracy Gullet’s offer to lead a campaign to make our museum what everybody hoped it would be.

If the big whigs can do it, so can we.