Virtual Exhibitions

We are busy preparing for our Annual Gala!

In preparation we’ve started decorating the windows with a vignette that shows animals, children, and adults stepping right up to buy tickets from P.T. Barnum himself for the Gala. We’ve decided to use packing materials as our c...

There are a number of stories attributed to P.T. Barnum within the popular American culture; things and phrases that we understand but their back stories rest in the shadows of our collective memory. The classic is of course the phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute” which is falsely attributed to Barnum as he would have preferred “there’s a customer born every minute” knowing the public wasn’t below him, stupid and easily duped, but rather laugh...

Requests come in to the Barnum Museum from across the world and each time the inquiry teaches me something new about the collections. Recently we had a request to loan specific items concerning Tom Thumb. While in the midst of inventorying the entire collection in 2009 we had the tornado and so the Tom Thumb collection was never inventoried. Rather, it hasn’t been inventoried since 1989. The boxes looked hardly touched and thankfully much of the 1989 inventory still corresponded with th...

Dear Friends;

Thank you for your concern over the Barnum Museum! We worked diligently on Friday of last week to secure the items within the Museum and to board up the windows in preparation. The beautiful etched glass globes of the chandeliers came down and the remaining paintings were safely stored. Even Baby Bridgeport was wrapped and secured against Mother Nature. Thankfully, the Museum lost power for only a brief period and sustained no known damage at this time. The st...

I had trouble coming up with a title for this blog entry. It could be read: "verifying" history or verifying "history". I have been working on comparing the speech P.T. Barnum gave before the Connecticut legislature in support African-American suffrage as recorded in his autobiography with newspaper articles published about the speech. In truth there is no way to verify an autobiography for it will always contain the point of view of the writer (be it right or wrong). But many would argue tha...

It's hard to believe that it has already been over two months since my internship began, and that it is already time for it to come to an end.  I have seen and done so much since I've come here and I've really gotten a chance to see the museum change.  When I first arrived there were still so many artifacts sitting in the main museum.  The mummy remained on the third floor, and most of the second floor exhibits were still up.

Now the third floor is completely barren. ...

Today we took huge reproduction lace curtains out of one of the "Period rooms".  Our other "period room" had already had it's lace curtains removed, and since then they have been carefully cleaned so that they're nice and clean and white again, like they were when they were first hung up.  The curtains we took down today, on the other hand, were a dingy yellowish gray. 

We took the curtains outside one by one and shook them free of dust. They looked a little better after...

The collection has been slowly migrating down from the main museum into the air-conditioned exhibition hall ever since the tornado.  Some things have been easier to move than others.  Small items can be picked up and shelved with relative ease and safety, while large items, like bicycles and carriages, are little more difficult to relocate.  The biggest problem, however, has been large framed paintings which needed a place where they could be hung before they could be moved any...

One of the challenges of trying to manage the Collections here at the Museum is that we have so many artifacts with such varied points of origin.  Had you visited pre-tornado you would have seen a case on the first floor that exhibited some of the original collection of the Barnum Institute including a whistling swan, Roman dagger, and Aztec pottery.  These items are now off exhibit and need to be boxed with like items.  However, we already have fourteen boxes and three shelves...

This week free standing walls began to be moved out of the main museum and into the air conditioned exhibition hall that most of the collection is currently inhabiting.  This process is planned to be continued next week when we will be moving bigger walls and bringing paintings down to hang on them.  Anyway, in all this hubbub a few large, leafy, green potted plants had to be moved out of the way, and were eventually set directly in front of the taxidermed elephant in the lobby....