It's-- it is amazing the amount of photographs we have and the amount we'd still like to have, but the amount that we have tell such a wonderful story about this area and this place we call home.

[music playing] The feeling of home and pride people have for their hometown is rooted in a community's culture and it's often expressed in stories, art, music, and captured in photographs, films, and depictions of everyday life or events that occur around town.

The city of Springfield, Missouri, may just be another dot on the map to many, but if you've lived here, worked here, or even just visited, you gain a better sense of what makes this place special.

The city is fortunate to have a well-documented and curated collection that does a remarkable job of presenting the stories of Springfield history and culture.

Today, we'll visit with the History Museum on the Square's executive director John Sellars as he gives us a quick tour of Springfield's past.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present OzarksWatch Video Magazine, a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

This is a very special show for us today.

We're coming to you, everyone, from the History Museum on the Square here in Springfield.

And this is quite a facility.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We are so proud of it and so proud of where we have come from and the development of this museum.

It's been an extraordinary trip.

I want to do kind of a history of the history of the museum, and-- but we'll start off a little bit-- talk about a little bit about yourself and what you do and-- Don't tell anybody but I just-- I just stand around and enjoy myself, have fun, tell people great stories and work with a tremendous crew of people.

I've got a team here that you just-- beyond compare.

This-- I was lucky to come in when this building was under construction, and I never really dreamed it would be this spectacular.

So it was really nice to come back today and see it in all of its glory.

Yeah, when we first looked at this building, it was full of stuff.

I'll have to use stuff is the only word.

It was full of things that had just been abandoned and left by previous tenants to the tune of about 14 dumpster loads of stuff.

And we got all that cleaned out and then started to work on it and then found out that a lot of the building-- because this whole corner of the square from Boonville Street here over to St. Louis Street, it all burned to the ground in 1913, and they were very concerned about having another major fire like that that would burn a whole quarter of the business district.

So everything in here was-- had asbestos in it, the plaster on the walls, everything.

So we had to work very hard.

The abatement for that was significant and time consuming, and a lot of things just-- it just drug it along and drug it along.

And people were thinking we would never get open.

And so when we finally did, I think they've been just amazed at what this has turned out to be.

Let's go back a little bit.

The first-- Springfield has long-- I guess a long history of trying to keep artifacts and things that are important to the history of the city.

What was the-- what was the first kind of I guess formal museum?

There was a small exhibit in city hall that was part of the art museum.

And the art museum had had some artifacts and things that they had been donated by supporters of the art museum, and so there was a small exhibit there, first one thing and another.

And then when the bicentennial was approaching, the Greene County Historical Society along with other people like Kitty Lipscomb and other civic leaders said we need to have an exhibit up for the bicentennial about the history of this area and its significance to the state.

And so they worked very hard-- and I was lucky enough to be one of them-- worked very hard and developed a bicentennial museum.

And we ran a little storefront down here on College Street and a building owned by Charles Shepherd, and we put our artifacts and things that we had gotten from the art museum and other places in there, and just told the stories of pioneer life and what it was like to live here.

And then as time went on during the bicentennial, a lot of interest-- and we thought it would kind of fade.

Well, it didn't.

People were really they were enthusiastic about knowing about this place.

This crossroads right where we are now has been a crossroads of people since the Native American times.

Five Native American trails crossed right here because just to the north of us was a huge pool of water, springfed that attracted game and attracted people.

And so those five trails made it easy for the first settlers to get here as well.

And then it just continued to grow and grow and grow.

So those kinds of stories precipitated a real interest in the local people.

And so as time went on, we had the opportunity to move from here to the Bently House, which was a huge mansion over by Drury University, and we moved in there in 1978 two years after we opened and remained there until 1992 in this Victorian home, telling-- continuing to tell the stories and acquiring more and more things.

We put out a call for photographs-- I'll never forget it.

We put out a call for photographs.

People wanted to donate photographs, and this was on time before digital photography.

So everything that people gave to us, we either had to retain and keep the originals, or we had to go somewhere and have them duped off with an actual camera stand and everything, which we used at that time Ozark Camera over on Walnut Street.

And then we had to figure out where the picture was taken and what was going on, and a lot of them we couldn't.

But we asked for donations of photographs, and we got 4,000 pictures.

That's how interested people were in having their things in the museum.

And now we've got an archive of somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 photographs of just historical sites and scenes and events here in this area.

And so it really became something that was tremendously attractive.

And in the Bentley house with the wonderful architecture and a beautiful home, it was a good place to build-- continue to build our interest.

Then after that in 1992, a book came out called "Crossroads at the Spring," which told the story of the development of this area.

And in conjunction with that, the museum moved again to old City Hall and took over part of the third floor in old City Hall.

And it was even more exposure for us.

It was a wonderful place, and we had a great time there.

Our biggest problem with that building was that it was old.

It built in 1890-- in the 1890s, and it was built to last.

The walls were, like, 24 inches thick, and they were not-- it was just-- it was a tough place to take ourselves into a more modern museum type activities.

There was no interactives.

You just put stuff on the wall or put them in the box and let people go by and look at them.

So we stayed there until we acquired this building in 2010.

And we came down here, did one exhibit in the building, and then we moved out of here and into the building next door.

We acquired it.

And then ultimately we had this building, the building next door, and then the Fox Theater.

So as we moved we continued to-- we moved into the Fox and had our exhibits in there while we were developing this building and the building next door into this museum.

My first exposure actually to the Historical Society was at the old City Hall because I used to have to go there for city council meetings and so I would wander down and look around.

Yeah, that was one of the deals.

To have that space provided by the city, we had to be open for city council meetings, so we were always up there.

JIM BAKER: It was a nice way to spend some time between some of the hearings and stuff that we had to do.

So anyway when you came to this building, it's kind of a-- and it's a fairly massive building, so there's a lot of work.

One thing I wanted to ask you about, I'm always curious-- we'll get back to the history of this-- but for the exhibits, you've also got a whole bunch of stuff that you've got to store.

Oh, yeah.

JIM BAKER: Right?

I mean, so what's the ratio normally of stuff that's stored to stuff that's-- 100 to 1, maybe.

You have a lot-- Because for a couple of reasons.

One, just because we have a massive amount of stuff but also because it is-- there are parameters that are dictated by exposure to light, exposure to humidity, exposure to so many things that these things can only be out and exposed for a certain period of time.

So you need to pull them down and put something else in their place, maybe something very similar but something else in their place so that they don't deteriorate just by sitting out in sunlight.

And that's one of the things about this museum.

These windows are an inch-- inch and 3/4 thick, and they have the ability to stop a huge amount of the UV light.

So even that it opens it up and it's a wonderful open museum, it still stops that UV light from coming in that would deteriorate a lot of the archival material.

That light is really the enemy of most exhibits, right.

Exactly.

JIM BAKER: You were talking about the photo archives and stuff, and there's thousands and thousands of photos.

Why don't you talk a little bit about how people can access those.

We have a significant amount of them online and you can go to our website HistoryMuseumOnTheSquare.org and go to Search Our Archives and it'll bring up search engine where you can punch in the information.

It'll bring up any photographs attached to that.

Or you can just get on somewhere and just scroll through and look at them.

It's-- it is amazing the amount of photographs we have and the amount we'd still like to have.

But the amount that we have tells such a wonderful story about this area and this place we call home.

We're so lucky, so fortunate.

And a lot of them came to us as negatives.

When we put out a call for photographs at one point, we got a call from a man over at city utilities, and he said, hey, I've got a little box of pictures for you.

It's actually all negatives.

Do you want 'em?

I said, oh, absolutely.

He said, well, a lot of them are quite old that we just acquired as we moved on as we moved to things.

All of those companies that are part of city utilities now were at one time all independent and they were privately owned and they'd been acquired by city utilities.

So these were all photographs that were just in offices laying around that when they would acquire something they would just throw 'em in a box.

So he brought me this huge box of negatives.

And I've got a little photo negative viewer, and I'm sitting at my desk just going holy crap.

And we started printing some of them off.

Huge amount of them were of wonderful pictures of buildings and of, like, street cars in the picture because a lot of them were from the traction company when they were electric street cars.

And every one of them, they put the date on 'em so we knew exactly when they were taken.

It was-- it's just a wonderful archive.

So this kind of-- those kind of photographs are a historian's dream because you can-- Oh absolutely.

JIM BAKER: Sit and reconstruct a whole time period by-- if you wanna do that.

JOHN SELLARS: No question.

We got one wonderful one of a street car at the corner of Jefferson and St. Louis with the Colonial Hotel in the background, and it had-- it's one of the few we have that has the columns on the front of the hotel that were originally on the hotel when they built it.

And those columns are now on the open air stage at the art museum in Phelps Grove Park.

Wow.

Yeah.

JIM BAKER: What's your favorite exhibit here?

It'd be like picking your favorite child.

My favorite exhibit in the building-- Uh huh.

I really enjoy-- I enjoy the time machine because it's so flexible.

We have 43 stories on it right now.

It'll hold up to 100 different stories.

We can put them on, take them off.

It's so wonderful and flexible, and it tell such great little vignette pieces about the history of Springfield and history of this area.

What's the time period that it actually starts and-- It is start-- it starts around 1800, and it comes all the way through.

And you just travel through time.

It's a wonderful piece.

JIM BAKER: As I get older, I kind of think I can really relate to 1800.

Yeah, I'm feeling that myself.

Yeah.

So I didn't want to sidetrack, but I was just kind of curious about how you manage all that.

So for this building, quite a bit of work had to take place.

JOHN SELLARS: Yeah.

You were telling me a little bit about the elevator, which was ... Oh, yeah, the elevator, this-- of course, the old elevator was an old cable type elevator, but this elevator is hydraulic.

And because of that, there's a huge piston, and they had to drill through 38 feet of bedrock under the building to get the piston in that would have the lift cylinder to lift the elevator up to this area.

And because of that, we had to drill this huge hole, and we brought in a company from down in Louisiana that worked in the gas and oil fields that had a drilling rig that they could bring in here and that was remote.

It would attach to a truck that powered it sitting out here on the street, but then it had these long tubes-- pneumatic tubes that came inside.

And they spent 10 days here drilling through the stone and driving everybody in the state office building across the street absolutely crazy because of the sound, because of the noise.

Yeah, the noise had to be just really tremendous.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everything echoes so much in between these buildings.

Did you have to tear a lot of walls out and do a lot of the different things... Everything.

When we got-- when they got done with the asbestos remediation in this building, I tell people we had a brick box.

That was it.

We had brick walls, we had concrete floors, and that was it.

That was all that was left.

Everything else has been built back from just that box.

Yeah, I was going to ask you a little bit about some of the exhibits that are permanent, some that you put up and down.

But before I do that, what are some of the companies that you had come in to help do all of this 'cause the design in this building is fantastic.

We interviewed three different consulting companies that consult on museums and what they do, and the one we chose was Gallagher and Associates out of Washington DC.

They helped design the World War II museum in New Orleans and things like that.

I mean, top top shelf people.

And then they brought in a company called Explus that actually did the fabrication and built all the things you see in here, which are just extraordinary.

And along with that, Richard Lewis Media Group out of Boston did all the videos and all the electronic things.

And so those are the main players, and then locally picked technologies did all the electronics and all the local stuff.

And we-- our contractor, of course, was local here as well at Kenmore Construction.

It's really fascinating because the building has the old touches, and you get the nooks and crannies and corners like with the jukebox.

But you also supplement that with some interactive-- JOHN SELLARS: Oh, yeah there's a huge-- Very modern-- modern displays as well-- Huge amount of interactives and it's so much fun.

You just walk up and touch something, and it starts talking back to you.

Or you just walk by it, and it starts talk-- those are the ones that are kind of fun to watch reaction.

People will walk by, and all of a sudden, the walls start talking to them or whatever.

JIM BAKER: Yeah.

One of the things I was noticing, too, is the elevator's enormous.

So if anyone's in a wheelchair or has any kind of mobility problems-- Plenty of room in there.

And it also gives us the capability to move things around.

JIM BAKER: Also the way the stairwells wind around, it's an interesting to go from one floor to the next.

JOHN SELLARS: And we actually replicated the railings, the railings throughout the building.

They had to be taller, so we had to replicate them rather than use the originals.

But those are the same pattern of railing that was in the old Barts-- the old Nathans building here.

So for-- let's talk a little bit about the exhibits that are up.

You can walk through here and get a pretty good sense I think very quickly of what's been important in the historical development of Springfield.

JOHN SELLARS: Well-- and it's sequential.

So you start on the first floor with Native American, and then as you travel up, you come along 'til you get to this one, which is Route 66, where we're standing now.

So it's kind of a sequential tour through the history of this area.

And it's well researched and well documented with tremendous artifacts, things you won't see anywhere else.

And we're tremendously proud of it.

The pioneer area on into Civil War, the Wild Bill Hickok shooting, which we have an interactive over there where you can target shoot with a pistol that feels and weighs just the same as a pistol that he would have used and then out here into Route 66.

So what's the-- as you work through the history of Springfield, what are the events that you just personally after all this because you do a lot of reading, a lot of study and all that.

What are the key-- are the exhibits pretty much reflective of what you see as being important in the history?

A lot of it is, but we've also-- we've got a time machine down on the mezzanine.

It's an old streetcar and you in the streetcar and you can travel through time of this area and see a lot of events that, you know, you wouldn't normally have in a museum like the cobra scare in 1953 when they found somebody released a whole crate of cobras down the street here.

Things like that that you wouldn't normally see, you travel through this time machine and get to see them all in small little vignettes that are all projected.

I just had a wonderful vision of a bunch of cobras coming around that would not be good...

It was crazy.

For-- is there a difference between, like, for kids that come up for younger people versus, like, older people?

What are-- are the exhibits-- I would assume that for younger folks, the Route 66 would be pretty exciting.

A lot of it.

And then down on the mezzanine, there's a rail car, a passenger car.

You can go in, and we have a video game in there where you can travel from St. Louis to Springfield by horse and wagon, by train, or by automobile.

And there are things you have to gather and things you have to avoid to make your trip successful.

And then as you travel along, little factoids will pop up.

So you're always learning something as you're traveling along.

Yes, this could be a great educational experience.

Do you have a lot of school kids that kind of come through here?

We do.

We have a lot of school tours.

A lot of the homeschoolers come.

A lot of public school kids come.

Private schools, they all-- they'll bring groups in.

Yeah.

I know Springfield is very lucky and very fortunate to have this museum plus the Discovery Center so that I know that kids that go on field trips really get some great exposure to the history of-- We're very, very happy about that, and we got an on staff educator that that's his-- pretty much his focus is working with those groups, working with teachers, working with the classes, and getting them in and getting them going where they need to go.

Can you talk just a little bit about the Fox Theater.

It's a pretty fascinating case.

JOHN SELLARS: Yeah.

The Fox, of course, like I said, this whole corner burned down, so the Fox was the last piece of the puzzle.

It opened in 1916.

And we're very fortunate to have it as part of our facility here.

We use it for groups and tours.

I do programs in there, and we also rent it out for musical groups and lectures and events like that.

So it's really a very important part of evolving...

It's a good revenue generator for us, plus it's a great facility for us when we have larger groups.

JIM BAKER: One of the things that-- I used to do a lot of-- dabble a lot in urban planning.

And one of the things that you discover when you do that is that museums-- history museums, art museums-- are huge economic development drivers.

They actually, in some cases, outdraw sports teams and stuff like this, so they're very important.

To anchor the square here in Springfield, this is a very important facility in my view.

How do you see this over the next several years evolving?

We're very proud about it.

We're very proud of the exposure we got.

We were named the number one new event venue in the country in 19-- or in 2019.

So we're very proud about that.

And so I think as time goes on, we'll see a lot of people, especially on this Route 66 gallery, that will come through just see it because we are such an important piece of the history of Route 66.

Yeah, just one thing, you were telling me about the detail that this wall was actually 66 on it.

Yeah, it's free.

The detail that went into this is-- it's amazing.

I really hope people can get out and come and visit.

What's the hours of operation.

We're open Wednesday through Sunday-- or Wednesday to Sunday.

Wednesday through Saturday we're open 10:00 to 5:00, and then suddenly, we're open 1:00 to 5:00.

And then you have a website that-- Right, HistoryMuseumOnTheSquare.

org.

JIM BAKER: And we'll put that up on the screen like we do, so.

Well, I think that I really appreciate you taking the time and-- We're always happy to have you come by.

Oh, this is great.

I do hope people can come by 'cause the-- just walk from the first floor to the fifth floor is really like a walk through time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

We'll be back in a moment.

ANNOUNCER: Ozarks Public Television and Missouri State University are proud to present OzarksWatch Video Magazine, a locally produced program committed to increasing the understanding of the richness and complexity of Ozarks culture.

Visit our website for more information.

I hope you'll take the time to tour the History Museum on the Square and learn more about the rich history of Springfield.

Whether you're a native resident or just passing through, there's plenty of fun facts you'll learn by visiting.

I want to thank my guest John Sellars for the tour, and I invite you to join us again next time for OzarksWatch Video Magazine.

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