Village News

On Friday February 21 at 7 pm, the Mennonite Heritage Village hosted a double exhibit opening and public presentation about the museum collections. The evening was inspired by our 50th Anniversary in 2014, and our theme for the year, Celebrate with Us.

The main exhibit, in the Gerhard Ens Gallery, is a showcase of our museum’s artifacts, which have been collected over the past 50 years. The museum is the steward of almost 16,000 artifacts spanning centuries, certainly more than we can share at any one time. This exhibit gives us the chance to show both the breadth and the quality of the collection, which continues to grow every year.

In recent discussions with other curators, we talked about the sheer numbers of items in the collections at our different institutions. Do we have too many things? This is something every museum curator needs to ask. Is having one representative object of a cultural tradition enough?

Let us say there is only one work of “fraktur art” allowed in the collection that represents this tradition once common to Mennonites. Is this effective or useful? Do we then know anything about the tradition and what it meant to people? My answer would be no, simply because one piece does not make a representative sample. It takes a collection to make sense of the material culture of the past. But it is the individual objects that make that collection special.

Parting Thoughts

As I reflect on my time at this museum since 2003, I feel myself at home among the museum’s artifacts, not because of their research potential or their worth as antiques, but because they have allowed me to get to know the people behind them. This includes the young man who made a sewing box for his fiancé in 1906 with hundreds of individually cut pieces of coloured straw, utilizing a centuries-old multiple star design. It also includes the middle aged Mennonite man working in a copper mine in Yugoslavia who, ill and without children, gave his young Russian co-worker his family heirloom – a tobacco box made of cow horn. The wife of this Russian man would later donate the piece to the Mennonite Heritage Village, and it seems to me this act of donating to our museum was as touching as the first gift. Finally, I think of the dress we have of a girl who died too young, and the mother who kept her little dress in a drawer in the house for decades. The emotions of all these people, illustrated with these simple, beautiful objects and tied so humbly to the wider arc of history is what I will remember most about the museum’s collections.