I don’t know for sure whether history
repeats itself, but I do know this: What goes around comes around.
Nearly 100 years ago, on Nov. 27, 1907,
Professor Alja Robinson Crook, curator of the Illinois State
Museum, addressed the Springfield Ad Men’s Club at the group’s
home in the Ferguson Building at Sixth and Monroe streets. After
“a delicious turkey dinner,” Crook spoke on “The
Museum and Its Relation to the Welfare of Springfield.”
The Springfield
News gave this account of
Crook’s speech: “He urged a great appreciation on the
part of the people of the city for the value of the institution and
emphasized in a forcible way the desirability of making it all that
a museum should be. He pointed out that such a museum, backed by
the finances of the state, and the encouragement of Springfield,
would be immensely valuable from a dollars-and-sense standpoint
because it would attract thousands of visitors from all over
Illinois every year.”
Hmmm, that sounds familiar.
Believe it or not, there are other fine
museums in the city of Springfield besides the arriviste Abraham
Lincoln Presidential Museum, not the least of which is the Illinois
State Museum, created by an act of the Legislature in 1877. It is
one of the most respected and professionally sound of the
state’s institutions and has been located in the Capitol
complex since the very beginning of its existence.
Unlike the fledgling presidential museum,
which has never known financial hardship, a change of
administration, or, indeed, any adversity whatsoever, the Illinois
State Museum has weathered many tough struggles in its nearly
130-year history of research, collection, and exhibition of its
rare and valuable holdings.
Among the most important figures in the
history of the institution is A.R. Crook (1864-1930), an
intellectual heavyweight who, unlike his predecessors, was adept at
winning friends and influencing the right people in many spheres of
society. He assumed curatorship of the museum when it was a
haphazard, obscure, and neglected ward of the state and for 24
years shepherded it on the path of growth, prosperity, and
prominence.
Alja Crook (the name Alja was a fusion of the
initials of President Lincoln and Vice President Andrew Johnson)
was born to devoutly religious parents at Circleville, Ohio, on
June 17, 1864. For a period of several years during his youth, the
family lived in Jacksonville, Ill., before returning to Ohio, where
Crook graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University (his father, the Rev.
Isaac Crook, was its president). He then traveled and studied
extensively in Europe before earning his doctorate in geology from
the University of Munich in 1892. For a year he was on the faculty
of Wheaton College as a professor of natural history, then spent 14
years as a member of the faculty of Northwestern University as a professor of mineralogy. Gov. Charles S. Deneen
appointed him curator of the Illinois State Museum, and he assumed the
position on Sept. 15, 1906, at a time when the impoverished museum,
having been evicted from the Capitol Building, was housed in one
second-floor room of the State Arsenal, across the street.
Immediately the socially skillful Crook began
to build bridges, both personal and professional, in Springfield
and around the state. Here he organized and was the first president
of the Mid-Day Luncheon Club, which grew from a small group of men
who went for long walks together and promised not to “talk
shop.” He established a free lecture course for the citizens
of Springfield, importing a guest lecturer or presenting the
program himself. He assumed the secretaryship of the American
Association of Museums and was instrumental in the formation of the
Illinois State Academy of Science, which he served as secretary and
editor, president and librarian. Crook saw to it that as the
collections of the museum grew, so did public interest in the
welfare of the institution.
It is almost impossible to overstate
Crook’s importance to the Illinois State Museum. In 1909, he
began to arrange meetings with the heads of various state agencies
to discuss mutually beneficial legislative action. He succeeded in
having the museum recognized as a division of government (then
under the Department of Registration and Education) and served on a
committee that prepared a bill to obtain appropriations for the
construction of the Centennial (now Howlett) Building. The Illinois
State Museum moved to the Centennial Building in 1923, which was
its home until 1962.
Crook was a deeply religious man for whom the
study of science and religious belief were not necessarily mutually
exclusive disciplines. He was a forward-thinking pragmatist whose
philosophy of the museum experience was one of accessibility.
In 1918, Crook wrote in a paper he titled “A Definition of a State Museum”:
“A State Museum is . . . a repository of ideas and deeds rather
than simply of objects. Instead of being a collection of things it is a
collection of thoughts.”
Terry Zeller reported in a 1991 paper that
Crook decried “the needless regulation that decreased the
usefulness of many museums” and further argued that “to
the common citizen it often seems that the museum is maintained for
the staff or for the collections, rather than for the public. Why
not make the museum as accessible as a dry goods store?”
Milton Thompson, who authored a history of the
museum, wrote: “The Illinois State Museum was fortunate to
have had fine, studious, responsible caretakers during those early
years of uncertainty, and it was blessed beyond realization to have
Dr. A.R. Crook as its leader at the time of its awakening.”
This article appears in Aug 18-24, 2005.
