Artifact Inventory

Is There an Electric Salad Bowl in Your
​Schoolhouse Museum Collection? 
Opening excerpt by Sarah Uthoff (see full article at bottom)

What’s an electric salad bowl, you ask? In the old Gil Gerard version of “Buck Rogers,” there was a scene when he was first shown his new apartment decorated by a historian of the 20th century. Did Buck point out to his friends everything this historian got right? No, he cocked an eyebrow and informed his friends that he didn’t have the heart to tell the historian that the lamp on the table wasn’t an "electric salad bowl." The reasons behind the misidentification were well thought out and made sense, but nothing could get around the fact (to those who really knew) that it just wasn’t an electric salad bowl.
It’s easy to laugh, but there just might be some electric salad bowls (things wrongly identified, from a different time period, poor conservation practices) in your collection, too. (CLICK ON THE BLACK BUTTON BELOW FOR FULL ARTICLE- by Sarah Uthoff)

Some of our readers will recognize this post! A thought provoking article from a past CSAA newsletter was written many years ago by CSAA member Sarah Uthoff, but it still resonates today. The clever title is intriguing and her questions and observations will have you checking your museum for items/artifacts that simply don't fit. Our schoolhouses that serve up living history to visitors are nostalgic recreations of country schools and we all try our best to offer lessons and activities that are time and materials appropriate. But, some of us might bend the rules a bit if our artifacts have been used at some time during the school's life.

For example, many schoolhouses have desks from various eras collected from generous donors and we make do with variety. Exact time periods matched with the exact materials are often a difficult thing to pin down if records don't exist for our school. Globes on display should reflect the era of the schoolhouse, but political boundaries change as we speak. A kind donor dropped off an antique glass butter churner at our schoolhouse...did schoolchildren churn butter in school? As to authenticity, CSAA member Bill Sherman would specifically like to see dunce caps eliminated from our country schools contending that they are more myth than reality. While they appear in European art quite frequently, actual use in America requires more research. Young visitors still think they're a hoot!

There are so many things to consider before chucking artifacts from our collections...#1 being we're attached to them and we love them! Nevertheless, have another go at Sarah's article to see if we might want to fine tune things about our collections and our practices.

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IS THERE AN ELECTRIC SALAD BOWL IN YOUR SCHOOLHOUSE MUSEUM?