Taking Possession and Troubling Preconceptions

In the spirit of complete candor, my first gut reactions to reading Heidi Aronson Kolk’s book Taking Possession: The Politics of Memory in a St. Louis Town House were anger and defensiveness. That’s because I am exactly the type of St. Louis booster that Kolk describes in her introduction.

 I’m extraordinarily proud to be from St. Louis – I chose to move back here after living in Ohio for ten years and after four years at Saint Louis University, I chose to stay in this city for graduate school. I am fascinated by our shared history and enthused about sharing it far and wide.

In Kolk’s words, I have whole-heartedly adopted “the [Thomas Hart] Bentonesque view – that St. Louis is perennially underestimated and overlooked on a national scale, and thus has been slighted by history” (5).

I’m used to hearing the criticisms of the city and I acknowledge its shortcomings – there certainly are many. But I deeply believe in the promise of the city guided by the experiences and lessons found in its past.

So Kolk’s (completely valid and constructive) critiques of the Campbell House Museum struck something deep inside me. With every page I read, I had to remind myself to be open minded, embrace my discomfort, and dig to find where that discomfort came from.

In the end, I discovered that Kolk’s argument troubled my personal definition of historical preservation and museum work. In my mind, preserving any part of the part is a work of preservation undertaken for every St. Louisan, present and future. Taking Possession forced me to reckon with the fact that no act of preservation is harmless, done outside of any agenda. To borrow from Kolk’s title, any time we undertake historic preservation, we are taking possession of idealized aspects of our city’s past and combating change in the present that we find less than ideal.

So, in this case study, city boosters fought to save the Campbell House while plans were being made to tear down minority neighborhoods like Mill Creek Valley and “revitalize” the deteriorating urban core of St. Louis that white residents were fleeing from in droves. Restoring and displaying a “intact” relic from St. Louis’s Golden Age is an act of laying claim to St. Louis’s public memory, planting a flag in our collective past for rich whites like the ones who used to inhabit Lucas Place.

Kolk’s book revealed to me the importance of diving into the past of the institutions we serve. If we want to be more welcoming, inclusive, and connected to the landscapes we sit in, we have to know what roadblocks from our past exist. Only then can we start tearing them down and moving forward. This message also resounds in our discussions of George Washington’s Birthplace and Greenfield Village, though it only hit me with force this week. And, going back to Nina Simon and The Art of Relevance, the work we do is not about us. It’s about bringing our communities into conversation with our past in ways that are relevant to them. When we know where we have struggled and failed, we can dust ourselves back off and try again.