McKee Enhances Society
Depression-Era Collections
Lucille Stugard McKee of Madison recently gifted more than 100 additional artifacts to the Museum collections. Many may remember Lucille's 1997 gift of more than 200 household and farm artifacts from the Springdale Township farm once operated by her father and mother Banford and Kathryn Hoesly Stugard. Lucille's original gift included toys, clothing, textiles, photographs and numerous items dealing with rural life from 1890 to 1950. A large portion of the items in her original donation are associated with the 1930s Depression era, including the wicker baby carriage she began her life in. Several of Lucille's original offerings are on display in the Museum's current exhibits.
For her recent gift Lucille concentrated on items her mother used in the operations of her farm home kitchen, most of which were found in its pantry. Among the pieces are large crock bowls used for making bread, depression period tumblers, bowls, canisters and bakeware, fancy and common serving pieces, and a World War II aluminum toaster complete with store tags and still in its box. Unusual items discovered among the pantry's shelves are a set of hog scrapers and butchering saw, Banford's shaving mug, razors and strap, a hat pin holder, as well as mustache cups. A blue glass kerosene lamp once placed in the window to let neighbors know of a family emergency was found among items on the highest shelves.
Lucille's recent gifts, added to those previously offered, make the Stugard collection the largest in the Museum's holdings pertaining to the Depression era. The collection will soon be catalogued and should be fully computerized by 2003. We are grateful to Lucille for keeping the Society in mind once again as a place to preserve local history.
Selma Woodburn advocated that history should be preserved where it happened; removal of artifacts and information from their original source lessens their historical context and importance, she maintained. With this in mind, she willed the Mt. Horeb Area Historical Society all the materials in her Madison home which pertained to her Mt. Horeb connections - the Sweet and Donald families - including items which originated at her family farm and those belonging to her parents John and Vona Donald. Though this bequest may seem simple, even routine, in Delma's case it is not. Delma and family members before her were conscientious savers - not collectors, as she often said but, rather, "preservationists," keeping family collections that spanned five generations together at her Madison home. In November, Society president Brian Bigler met with Delma's family to begin assessing the gift.
Curator Marietta Gribb was called in first to evaluate the huge assortment of clothing and textiles to determine which items to include in the Society's collections, and these amounted to several hundred pieces. The collection's remarkably broad range, from the 1850s to the 1980s, compelled the family and Society representatives not to disperse this unique portion of Delma's possessions. Most of the items had been carefully stored in Delma's attic, with notes attached which she or her mother had written - a curator's dream! And many of these notes are detailed - "purchased this shirt for $2.50 at Marshall Fields and John wore it with the blue suit at his inauguration as state Legislator in 1911." The textiles and costumes include items not commonly preserved: the underwear worn by family members on their wedding nights from the 1850s to 1920s, dusters, complete with goggles, worn during the days of open-top vehicles, a quilt made by Ellen Sweet in the 1860s, children's clothing from the 1870s to the 1920s, loom woven blankets from the 1850s to 1880s, Delma's dresses, including the gingham one she wore during her school project at Marshall Field & Company in Chicago, men's and women's hats from 1870 to 1980, Delma's and James's hiking clothes, the boots that Delma's grandfather, John Strong Donald, wore at his 1868 wedding to Ellen Sweet, who saved, among other things, her wedding fan. There is Delma's 1920s opera coat, her Campfire Girls costume, costumes she wore in school plays, her grade school dresses, a high school graduation dress, college dresses, and the red tam she wore to many of the Society's programs and dedications.