The Mummy, the Carousel, and the Dinosaur Eggs: I Took a VERY Deep Dive into the History of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

2008

 I've started to get really interested in really deep dives into really specific topics. Disassociating by immersing oneself into a research project is such a pleasant feeling!

The history of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis is one of my recent small obsessions. It's long been a special place for me and the kids, and it's been interesting to see how some of my favorite parts of the museum, such as its deep respect for children and its integration into the neighborhood in which it's placed, has manifested over the course of its existence. 

I found this 1982 museum-published history in my local university's library (along with some old speeches, guides to extinct galleries, and other interesting documents that I checked out and pored over), and I was riveted by the attention to small, vivid details that it brought to enliven what could have been an extremely dry museum history:

Most of the kids' favorite parts of the museum, such as their holiday celebration and dinosaur exhibit, are too recent to be in the book, but some, such as that carousel we ride every time we visit and the mummy we used to pay our respects to before Chicago took it back, are just as old.

2011

The story of the carousel is particularly interesting, and is a good example of the vivid details that I love most, the ones that would be completely lost to history without the work of journalists, anthropologists, and other historians who take an interest in first-person storytelling. The Broad Ripple Carousel dates to 1917, and operated in a local park until 1956, when the roof finally collapsed and destroyed it. By that time, the animals had been falling apart for a while, as well, getting no more than hasty, non-professional repairs. 

In 1965, the current director of the Children's Museum, Mildred Compton, tried to track down where these worn, broken, beloved 50-year-old carousel animals might have gotten to. This was back in the days when telephone tag apparently hadn't even been invented yet, because each check-in required her to take a physical trip to the physical office of the city's Parks and Recreation department. And because it's local government, mostly nobody had any idea what she was talking about. They'd sort of promise to look into it, but then whenever she'd check back in to pester whomever she'd wheedled that sort-of promise from, she'd find out that they'd left the department, someone new was in charge, and she had to ask them all over again, hear again that they had no idea what she was talking about, and again wheedle a new promise out of them to check into it.

2015

Eventually, Compton got the Parks and Recreation department to reckon that maybe they did have a few of the carousel animals in storage, and okay, fine, she could borrow two of them. They gave her two horses in godawful condition, and she got a local acquaintance to refinish them. He could do the sanding and oiling and repainting work okay, but he couldn't replace the tails, which had been real horse tails.

Did you know that as recently as the late 1960s there was a literal slaughterhouse in DOWNTOWN INDIANAPOLIS?!? And... it apparently regularly slaughtered horses, so much so that when Compton went down there to ask if she could maybe have a horsetail or two, they just showed her into a room where there lay a huge, bloody pile of horsetails??? She rifled through the pile until she found some that she thought might match the horses, then soaked and cleaned them herself in her own home.

2015

A few years passed, then in 1969, thanks to some excellent networking, Compton scored a promise from the Parks and Recreation department that the Children's Museum could have ALL of their carousel animals. Compton and a coworker went to the storage building to collect them, but the animals were in such terrible shape that they essentially ended up crawling around on the floor, trying to snag all the little broken-off pieces of body parts that were strewn around from over a decade of neglect. Even on the intact parts of the animals, the wood was split and warped, and the museum spent years sending the animals out a couple a time to professional restoration artists in Cincinnati. 

The original idea had been just to display the animals, because even though it was a children's museum, most of the museum exhibits weren't interactive yet, or really even hands-on. But then Compton went to a carousel convention (lol!), and the carousel enthusiasts convinced her that what she really ought to do is buy a vintage carousel mechanism and turn her restoration into a living, working carousel again.

2020

Which would be so cool! Except, the museum didn't have the complete set of original animals from that Broad Ripple carousel. There were supposed to be three leaping stags in among all the other prancing animals, but they hadn't been in that storage building. When Compton checked in about it, a staffer told her flat out that they had disintegrated, but that felt... suspicious.

So the museum literally got the local newspaper to run a column asking for the public's help to provide any information about these long-missing stags. And one day, an anonymous informant called the museum. He was all, "The Parks and Rec department has your stags. Go to this year's Christmas show and see."

2022

And wouldn't you know it, but when the Parks and Rec department put on the 1973 Christmas show, guess who was on the float pulling Santa's sleigh?

Three. Wooden. Stags.

Compton marched herself back to the Parks and Recreation department and gave them a lecture entitled "Did you NOT tell me that I could have ALL the carousel animals?"

2010, with a broken leg, riding a stag

And that's how the museum came to have a working 1917 carousel, stags and all, on the top floor! Fortunately, the carousel idea came around as the museum was working on plans to demolish the historic house they'd been operating out of and build a brand-new museum building in its place. The plans had to be altered to allow for the size and weight of the carousel, and it's on the top floor of the museum because that's the only place they could make those adjustments without having to pretty much start over from scratch.

2019, just having come from the temporary exhibit of Greek antiquities, riding a stag

I think the museum's emphasis on dinosaurs must have gotten started in the early 1970s, when that magical Mildred Compton convinced the owner of some of the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, found in the Gobi Desert from 1922-1923. The donor was the widow of Roy Chapman Andrews, the expedition leader of the group that discovered the eggs. Others of these eggs are at the American Museum of Natural History, and I'm not totally sure how he got some in his personal possession? I've actually got the book he wrote about this expedition, as well as some other books about him, on hold for me at the local university library, so I'm sure I'll know soon!

2010, taking the skin off a model T-rex so we can see its guts

Another long-time museum artifact that the kids don't remember--but I do!!!--is Wenuhotep, the mummy that the Children's Museum had on display from 1959 until the Art Institute of Chicago demanded it back in 2007. I remember there being some hard feelings about that return, because the museum had actually been permanently given the mummy by the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and they didn't know that the institute had only, itself, been borrowing that mummy from the Art Institute and therefore didn't have permission to give it away?!? So it was bittersweet to be reading about that titular mummy in this Children's Museum history, seeing how they built it a special exhibit when they remodeled and had it X-rayed so they could offer a more nuanced depiction of it to their visitors.

2011, during a homeschool class about Ancient Egypt

The kids and I did see Wenuhotep on exhibit a few years later at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it looks like in 2014 they did do some interesting studies of it, but it's been off exhibit there for quite a while. 

2013, in the Ancient Egypt exhibit (there's now a model mummy that kids can interact with)

It sure as heck wouldn't be off exhibit at the Children's Museum, is all I'm saying...

As happens with all the best deep dives, I now have a huge stack of books on adjacent topics to deep dive into--the Gobi Desert dinosaur finds! The ethics of displaying mummies in museums!--and a list of exceedingly tedious questions to ask the next time the kids and I volunteer at the museum--"Say, you wouldn't happen to have that 1920s model of the scene from Goldilocks and the Three Bears that your first museum curator made out of trash because the museum had so few exhibits handy for me to look at, would you? Um, and maybe can I also see the original museum logo, the giant wooden seahorse, that Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s dad commissioned? And maybe that arrowhead that was plucked from the corpse of a pioneer child, too?"

Here's to continuing to hide from all of my problems snugged up safely in the womb of academe!