This article appears in the Winter 2022 Issue of the Tennessee State Museum Quarterly newsletter.

"Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That there is hereby created a  State Museum for the purpose of bringing together the administration of the various collections of articles, specimens and relics now owned by the State …"

It was with these words that the Tennessee State Museum was formally established by law on May 21, 1937 during the Seventieth General Assembly.

Originally housed in the War Memorial Building, the Museum moved to the Polk Cultural Center in 1981, and then to its current building, now named the Bill Haslam Center, in 2018. Along the way, the Museum expanded its collection, enhanced its management systems and took advantage of new digital and technological opportunities, all while welcoming visitors to engage with the State of Tennessee’s collections. This year, as the Museum celebrates its 85th anniversary, we look back at some of those key advancements in the state’s dedication – as our mission reminds us – to procuring, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting objects which relate to the social, political, economic, and cultural history of Tennessee and Tennesseans, and providing exhibitions and programs for the educational and cultural enrichment of the citizens of the state.

Granny's Attic display at the Tennessee State Museum in War Memorial Building. From the Tennessee Department of Conservation Photograph Collection, 1937-1976, at Tennessee State Library & Archives.

Education

The educational benefits of maintaining a collection and running a state Museum was paramount when the Museum was established in 1937, which is why it was originally placed under a board with the Department of Education. That there was a framework to organize and care for collections in a State Museum was laudable. The initial budget for operations was set at $5,000.

Writes Dan Pomeroy, retired Senior Curator and Director of Collections, in an upcoming issue of the Tennessee Historical Society Quarterly: “The exhibit technique was generally what we now call ‘open storage,’ with the walls adorned by frame-to-frame portraits and paintings and a sea of glass cases containing an array of various artifacts, each with a typed index card label.” “Donations of artifacts were accepted as they walked through the door (including a taxidermized polar bear),” wrote Pomeroy in the State Museum newsletter in 2018. [AH1]

Exhibits at the Tennessee State Museum in War Memorial Building. From the Tennessee Department of Conservation Photograph Collection, 1937-1976, at Tennessee State Library & Archives.

Open storage and a curious assemblage of seemingly unrelated artifacts did not deter visitors, especially school children. In 1939, an article in the Nashville Banner cited that the “Interest of school children in the Tennessee State Historical Museum appears to be increasing” as it mentioned schools visiting from six different counties.

Significant changes to the Museum and its collections began in about 1970, when oversight for the State Museum was transferred to the new Tennessee Arts Commission. There was also a movement to build a Tennessee Performing Arts Center, which would be part of the new James K. Polk Center in downtown Nashville. Within a few years, plans were underway to move the State Museum to the Polk Center in the space underneath the Arts Center. Building on interest in establishing a military Museum, exhibits in the War Memorial Building would be re-designed as military history displays.

Expansion

By 1972, with the Bicentennial of the United States four years away, there was significant interest on both the state and national level in preserving cultural history, the Museum joined other cultural institutions in the implementation of an updated inventory system for each artifact that would make them easily identified and located. By 1977, staff developed and implemented new exhibit concepts, including design and installation, for the approximately 50,000 square feet of space the new Museum would occupy at the Polk Center. They had a challenge. While the collection was better organized and catalogued, it did not reflect Tennessee history fully.

“A significant effort to add to the quality and depth of the collection was thus a priority, and this had to be done at a breathless pace, in tandem with developing and designing the new exhibits,” writes Pomeroy in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly. A portion of the capital funds appropriated for the new Museum displays were quickly set aside for new acquisitions. Artifacts were purchased from private individuals and acquired from various auction houses and antique and art dealers. Items that came into the collection at this time included a silver watch presented by Territorial Governor William Blount to the state’s first governor, John Sevier, when Tennessee became a state in 1796; the sculpture of a lion by William Edmondson; and a silver cup by F.H. Clark & Company.

Exhibits at the Tennessee State State Museum in the Polk Cultural Center, 1981-2018.

The Tennessee State Museum opened in the James K. Polk Center in June 1981, with initial permanent exhibits devoted to the Frontier and Andrew Jackson periods. Subsequent years saw the development of exhibits on other historic eras, including Antebellum, Civil War, and the New South. The Museum in the Polk Center came to occupy 120,000 square feet of space on three floors, with about 60,000 square feet devoted to exhibits. The remainder was set aside for Museum support and collections storage.

Collections Management

As the number of objects in the collection grew, there were efforts made to properly care for and manage the artifacts. Shelving and professional grade storage cabinets were acquired, and objects were packed or re-packed in a manner to protect them for future generations. A computer-based collections management system was put into operation in 1996. That system continued to evolve and has been vastly upgraded over the years. The Museum now presents thousands of artifacts online, with that number continuing to grow, and makes information on the collection widely available to the public.

In the Polk Center, the Museum’s changing exhibit gallery offered opportunities to expand on the permanent galleries to share more of the collection and to bring in travelling exhibitions. These ranged from art exhibits, such as the Red Grooms Retrospective; to decorative arts, such as Tennessee Furniture Through 1850; to historical, such as the fiftieth anniversary of World War II, the Magna Carta exhibit, and the display of one of the original copies of the Emancipation Proclamation. Masterworks: Paintings from the Bridgestone Museum of Art drew more than 180,000 visitors to the Museum in the 1990s. In 2010, the Museum governance was moved from the Tennessee Arts Commission to the newly-formed Douglas Henry State Museum Commission.

A New Museum and New Era

As the collection and visitation grew, so did the realization that a dedicated, start-of-the-art building for the Museum was a necessity. In the spring of 2015, Governor Bill Haslam proposed an amendment to the budget for the design and construction of a new State Museum, while pledging to raise a significant amount of money privately. With the support of the legislature, that new structure opened in October 2018, and, for the first time since established in 1937, the Museum had its own building.

Tennessee State Museum at the Bill Haslam Center at sunset, 2021. Tennessee State Photography.

Whereas the Polk Center permanent exhibition interpretation ended around 1920, the new Museum features six permanent galleries that lead visitors up to present era, which includes many significant individuals, events and social movements from the last 100 years. These include Prohibition, the Jim Crow Era, Tennessee’s music industry, and the modern Civil Rights movement. Six temporary galleries allow for further display of the collection. Since its opening, temporary shows have included Red Grooms: A Retrospective; The State of Sound: Tennessee’s Music Heritage; Tennessee and The Great War: A Centennial Exhibition; Between the Layers: Art and Story in Tennessee Quilts; Let’s Eat:The Origins and Evolutions of Tennessee Food; Ratified: Tennessee Women and the Right to Vote; and Best of Tennessee Craft: 2021 Biennial.

Civil War and Reconstruction exhibition at the Tennessee State Museum at the Bill Haslam Center, 2018-2021.

The Museum’s commitment to education has never waned. Since opening, it has welcomed through its doors more than 350,000 visitors, including 55,698 students and teachers from 78 counties. The Bill Haslam Center, outfitted with the latest in video technology, enables the Museum to reach students throughout the state with virtual field trips. By including virtual tours and education programs within the classroom, the Museum has engaged with schools in 92 counties across Tennessee in its first three years in the new space. The Digital Learning Center offers an opportunity to broadcast lectures around the world. The website at TNMuseum.org gives a place to expand on the Museum experience with a video archive, blogs for adults and school age children, and online exhibitions. Robust social media channels give the Museum a platform to extend the stories of artifacts, and ultimately Tennessee, to virtual visitors wherever they are, or on the device they keep in their pocket.

The Tennessee State Museum has come a long way from that first museum in 1937, and as the Museum approaches the next 85 years, the commitment to preserving the state’s history and telling its stories is stronger than ever. How we do it in an ever-evolving world, full of technological developments and enhanced approaches to interpretation is yet to be seen. All we know is that we’ll be ready for it.