We’re only about six weeks away from opening the new future for our past.
It’s a building. But it’s more than just a building. It’s a statement. And, My God! What a statement it is.
Employees of the State Historical Society of Missouri are overseeing the move of thousands of cubic feet of documents, artworks, microfilmed newspapers, and other items from our corner of the basement of the Ellis Library on the University Campus to the new Center for Missouri Studies on Elm Street, just across from Peace Park on the north edge of the University campus. Our manuscript collection alone totals seventeen-thousand cubic feet. If we stood all of the pages in that collection on end, they could cover six football fields. And that doesn’t count the 54-million pages of newspapers on microfilm or twenty-thousand pieces of art, or maps, or sculpture or——-
—or all of the things we have gathered in our own 121-year history that tell the story of Missouri back to the days before it was called Missouri.
We’re going to officially open the place on Saturday, August 10, the 198th anniversary of Missouri becoming a state. It’s going to be a big deal. We’re going to have an outdoor ceremony to start and then we’ll move into the awesome lobby to finish up and to serve various celebratory goodies.
It’s been thirty years or so since the society began to seriously consider moving into a better place to serve the public and to serve the cause of history. It’s been a decade or so since our executive director, Gary Kremer, began a career-long effort to create the Center for Missouri Studies and to find a way to put up a building worthy of Missouri’s heritage.
We thought of some locations that didn’t work out. We drew some plans that didn’t work out. Gary talked to governors and legislators and those conversations didn’t work out—-for a while. But then the idea began to take hold and finally, about five years ago, the legislature provided $35 million for a Center for Missouri Studies.
We were blessed with the leadership of two extraordinary people during those years. Gary, of course (on the left), and Steve Limbaugh, whose enthusiasm and counsel was so central to the effort that we changed the constitution to let him be the first society president who could be elected to succeed himself.
For Steve, there was a special link to the society and to seeing the new building materialize. In 1915, when the society moved out of its then-quarters in Academic Hall (later renamed to honor University of Missouri President Richard Jesse) into the then-new university library, a law student who became Steve’s grandfather and still later became the society president, helped carry things from the FIRST old place to what is becoming the SECOND old place. Steve’s grandpa was Rush Limbaugh Sr., or as his biographer calls him, “The Original Rush Limbaugh.”
A lot of people for several generations of society leadership dreamed of what we are about to celebrate August 10. Many of them will be with us in our memories and, we hope, in spirit.
Three years ago we broke ground on what had been a deteriorating parking lot one-half block big. Only then did I begin to grasp how large this project would become. I saw the plans, the three-dimensional model that was less than a foot tall. I saw the architects’ drawings of the building’s exterior. But even now, after many hard-hat visits, my mind has trouble grasping the scope of what is soon to open.
Throughout this process, one of our staffers already has spent more time in the building than anybody other than the workers who have transformed lines on paper into the building we will dedicate in a few weeks. When our Senior Associate Executive Director, Gerald Hirsch, joined us a dozen years ago, he had no idea he would be our designated eyes watching each detail of the construction. But he’s been the go-to guy for dealing with any problems, adjustments, or changes that we’ve had to deal with.
I look from street level at this startling structure and I am always reminded of President Lincoln’s admonition to Congress on December 1, 1862: “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.”
On this corner on the southern edge of downtown Columbia and the northern edge of the University of Missouri will be the material expression of Lincoln’s words. The Historical Society of Missouri is moving from its easily-overlooked quarters in the library basement into this statement building. It is unique in the architecture of the university. And in its boldness, the building proclaims that history must be part of our character and that we dare not ignore it and dare not lose conscious thought that we create more of it each day.
We, today, are responsible for tomorrow’s history. And before we make that history, we should keep in mind something else Lincoln said that day: “We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.”
Perhaps if we consider the history we are making, which sometimes seems not to recall the history we and our ancestors made, our prospects for the future will be better.
We’ll dedicate this building, this statement on August 10. Join us.