Iredell Museums to spotlight history, piece by piece

Iredell Museums Executive Director Theresa Golas said she wants to get the many artifacts in the museums’ permanent collection out for the people to enjoy and learn from. 

The trouble is that the objects are so diverse and vast that it’s impossible to put them on display under one roof. Even getting a small fraction of the more than 4,000 pieces into a single exhibit takes some creativity.

“We have everything from a petrified tree to human remains (a mummy and skeleton are examples) to fine arts to old furniture to ritual masks to a bear to thousands of other items,” she said.

Among those other items is one the museum keeps in the kind of box you might use to package a bracelet or necklace for your wife or mother. The item doesn’t look like much: nothing jumps out at you. It doesn’t overwhelm the eye with glitter or brilliance. Perhaps, in fact, the best adjectives to describe it may be the very opposites of those terms. And there is nothing at all unique about its shape or size. 

If found, even during a treasure-hunting expedition, one might walk right past it, thinking it some kind of debris or maybe — from the distance — a discarded cigar. Aesthetically speaking, it is about as banal-looking an item as one might hope to see.

No, it is not the outward aspect of the chunk of intertwined oxidized wires enveloping a somewhat larger one that bring its value and earn its merit as an artifact, but rather what artsy folks call its provenance.

The 4-and-a-half-inch piece of rusted cable is a segment of the first transatlantic telegraph cable that actually worked. The first message ever conveyed without the use of a ship and a physical delivery between the so-called Old World and New World coursed — for the instant of a bleep — through the portion of cable that will be among the items on display at the Iredell Museums.

And those who believe such intercontinental endeavors were not undertaken until at least the 20th century would be off my nearly half a century, as the cable — which actually stretched from Newfoundland, Canada to a small island just off the coast of Ireland — a dates back to middle-Victorian England and Antebellum America.

Indeed, the very first transmission made across the Atlantic Ocean was from Queen Elizabeth herself offering well wishes to President James Buchanan. That was in 1858.

And if you just learned something, Golas and others with the museums just accomplished much of the goal of their upcoming exhibit.

“Part of the reason we want to get the pieces out on a yearly or — in the future — on a monthly basis is so we can learn about them ourselves,” she said. “It would be impossible for any one person to be an expert on all of it or even half of it in a lifetime or two lifetimes. So this kind of exhibit helps us learn about the items and to pass that information on to those who come to see them.”

Golas said she still has not come up with just the right title for the exhibit, which allows community leaders to make selections from the collection.

“I’m thinking about ‘What Would You Choose?’ ” she said.

Well, she’s got about a month to work on it. The exhibit, whose opening coincides with the annual downtown Statesville Holiday Open House on Dec. 2, will run through March 2012.

And about that stuffed bear, Golas and others with the museum are almost certain it’s a grizzly and that it was probably right-handed. 

To find out why, she said, you have to come to the exhibit.

Also, Iredell Museums is holding a fundraiser called the Fall Faux-Arts Ball, which aims to put an interesting twist on the notion of the masquerade ball. 

“You come as your own work of art,” Golas said. “And that’s kind of small exhibit on its own because the people who come are creating the art. They are the art.”

For more information on exhibit hours and more, call the museums at (704) 873-4735.