Picture taken by Zachary White, November 28, 2009
The first thing that grabs your attention about the Watkins Museum is the remarkable architecture. The building size, shapes, angles, and color is unique to the area surrounding the Museum. The architecture on the inside of the building is just as impressive. The wood work is extraordinary. The crown molding and framing around the windows showed how committed the architects were in making this building the pride of Lawrence. The building was built between 1885 and 1888. The first floor of the building was originally used as offices for lawyers and public groups. The second floor was used as the Watkins National Bank. The third floor housed the main office for the J.B. Watkins Land Mortgage Company. In 1929, Elizabeth Miller Watkins donated the building to the city of Lawrence. The building was then used as the City Hall until 1970. Then in 1975 the building became the Elizabeth M. Watkins Community Museum and later became the Watkins Community Museum of History.
The museum is packed full of information. There were displays that told the story of the Underground Railroad in Lawrence, Phog Allen, James Naismith, and Langston Hughes. All of the displays were very informative. They provided actual artifacts such as Phog Allen’s Coaching Notebook and letters from Langston Hughes to family members. I also learned about what the city of Lawrence looked like in the late 1890’s because of the very detailed map that outlined every commercial building in the city at that time. I also learned about two potential blogging topics the Great Flood of 1951 in Lawrence and the Vinegar Gang of 1882.
One of the things about the museum that was really interesting was the timelines on the 2nd floor. One of the timelines documented significant events from overseas, another timeline was about significant events involving Native Americans, and the other timeline followed the lives of the people of the United States. I thought this was really cool. It really made me think about how certain events, inventions, policy’s and other things really affected all the different groups. This timeline matches up with what we do in our class; we look at things from multiple perspectives. In HIST 348 we have learned about events from the perspective of Mexican immigrants, women, African-Americans, children, poor people, populists, and many other groups. Seeing things from multiple perspectives is an extremely important, if not the most important, part of history and historiographies. Without looking at things from multiple vantage points historians and others can miss out on important pieces of the story.
http://www.watkinsmuseum.org/
