The last day I was in Iowa was bitterly cold for early May. My brand new Nebraska sweatshirt was no match for the northerly winds so I sought out a place I could spend a couple of hours indoors before heading to the airport. The State Historical Museum looked like a safe bet. It was big and they don't charge admission.
I unintentionally entered the museum through a side entrance and was temporarily disoriented because it didn't look like much of a museum from that vantage point. I made my way to the main lobby and distractedly started browsing a small display about energy in Iowa as I warmed up. I soon realized what I was reading didn't making much sense.
There was a reason for that! The descriptive text had an astonishing number of punctuation errors, grammatical mistakes, misspellings, and just awful writing. No wonder it wasn't making sense! There was no way the exhibit underwent any kind of editing or review. How is that possible? It was a real head scratcher. I should have taken pictures but after a week of sightseeing I was pretty much done with photography.
I moved on to an interesting exhibit in the second photo called Patten's Neighborhood. Robert Patten owned a print and photography shop in the African-American neighborhood of Des Moines for much of the 20th century. He also sold cosmetics and other items in the predominantly black Center Street neighborhood (which was eventually demolished to make way for a hospital parking lot). Patten knew that the photos he took and the things he printed for the Center St. businesses would tell the story of the neighborhood. He wanted to open a museum to display his collection but never got the chance. He did, however, ride his bicycle around town well into his 70s (there was a great action photo of him (that appeared in the Des Moines Register) riding home when he was serving on a jury after he convinced the judge to postpone a trial so he could go home and turn his oven off).
The exhibit, which used parts of Patten's collection, was informative. Too bad they alternated spelling his name Patten and Patton. Again with the head scratching. How did the error not get caught?
Anyway, the giant mammoth skeleton takes pride of place in the atrium of the State Historical Museum of Iowa. I mean, where else in a museum of Iowa history would you display a mammoth found in southeast Wisconsin?
At this point I didn't know if I was at the actual state museum or a bizarro world version of the museum. The museum experience was ruined for me because now I was carefully scrutinizing everything I saw for mistakes. One gallery containing an eccentric collection of artifacts was called Rarely Seen -even though it is a permanent gallery that is accessible 363 days a year. That may have been where the tree section was located.
I loved the tree section. "...unloaded in Des Moines by mistake"... but we we kept it! Was it stolen off the train? Did anyone try to return it to its rightful owner?
After the museum there was only one more stop on my Iowa itinerary. Well, two. Despite the cold I walked around the East Village neighborhood for a bit, winding up at the excellent Gong Fu Tea shop.
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