A Pair of Missouri Museums (Days 4-5)

Kitchen wares recovered from the Arabia.

While in Kansas City, we saw a pair of museums that I think one can find only in Missouri.

Our first morning there, we went to the Steamship Arabia museum. The museum centers around the contents of a steamship that sank in 1856. Its contents were remarkably well preserved under the silt of the Missouri River and recovered in an excavation in the late 1980s. The steamship was travelling up the river with provisions for more than a dozen general stores in various frontier communities. So what was uncovered is a vast collection of housewares and tools indicative of mid-nineteenth-century life.

Trash or treasure. You can decide that for yourself. For me the answer is pretty obvious.







What was perhaps strangest about the museum was that it is a for-profit institution run by the families who found the boat back in the 1980s. This lends it a rather odd feel. At times the aesthetic is like that of the touristy businesses that inhabit Gettysburg. Yet at the same time, I sensed that the history is pretty legitimate. A historian and researcher employed by the museum guided us around and it was obvious to me that she wasn't on a script. She fielded questions with a trademark midwestern twang (I loved the folksism she shared about the Missouri river (too thick to drink, too thin to plow). The artifacts were artfully displayed. And the museum was candid that they relied on visitors like us to pay their admission and spread the good word.

The items, by the way, were quite ordinary. Lots of boots. Lots of tools. Lots of dinnerware, most of it fairly plain. It was a time capsule of ordinary home goods from 170 years ago.

Plain but abundant goods. Casualties of a disaster on the river. Retrieved by modern-day fortune seekers. A tale that seems like Missouri to its core.



A second museum that made me think much about this state was the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, something Sam and I took in together late on Tuesday. The first formal organization of the Negro Leagues took place in Kansas City. And throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Negro League teams from the city were among the best in that circuit of baseball.

I learned a lot there with Sam. The fragmentary and evolutionary nature of the leagues. The pride with which the community looks at its stars. The aspects of the sport which were, sadly, exploitative (the Negro Leagues' teams never played in a venue owned by black business owners and the rents they sometimes had to pay were steep).

So what did this have to do with Missouri or Kansas City? I love that just a few blocks away one can still drive by the Colored Y.M.C.A. building where the first league came into existence. There's a mockup of a baseball field there. Kansas City was also the city where players could most often find decent lodgings, and where a second-generation owner of the Monarchs did some rather remarkable deeds to keep alive the sport in the depths of the depression.

I was sad I couldn't take photos inside the museum. One of the most memorable exhibits in it was what they call the field of legends. It's a small-scale baseball diamond. At each position there is a bronze statue of one who may have been the greatest to play the game. Standing next to life-sized statues of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, set against a green outfield fence with retro advertisements invites some goosebumps.

And then driving by it on the way home and having a catch with your kid is an exhilarating one.