BROOKINGS – The South Dakota Agricultural Heritage Museum – until 1977 the Stock Judging Pavilion – is not unlike an iceberg. There’s as much or more below the surface than above.
In the cavernous basement beneath the main exhibit floor is a mix of offices and interesting collections that are not open to the public.
“My office used to be the sausage and rendering room,” said director Gwen McCausland, leading The Brookings Register on a tour earlier this week, as the museum prepared to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Along the way she points out a “small artifact collection” in what was “a cooler that still has the meat hooks.” Another area houses “historical books on farming that date back to the turn of the (20th) century, anything to do with agriculture.”
In a nearby locked room is the Eugene Beckman Archive. The director noted that Beckman was “a man who collected implement manuals and tractor manuals. And so we have a fairly extensive catalog collection of various models of machinery.
“We get a lot of requests from people restoring tractors or other pieces of machinery,” she added. Upon request, the museum can scan and email information needed for working on a particular piece of machinery.
Additionally, the museum has an 11,000-square-foot pole barn off-site that houses much of its large tractor and implement collection.
According to McCausland, 90 percent of the collection is too big to fit through the museum doors, so those items are not put on display. Like the basement, the pole barn is not open to the public.
In total, the museum has about 120,000 items that include: about 80,000 images, photographs and paper documents; close to 20,000 small artifacts; and a large number of tractors and farm implements. There remains a need for more space.
‘To inspire a passion’
While the museum celebrated its 50th anniversary this past week, from the days before South Dakota became a state in 1889, the stuff of history was being captured and saved for posterity at the then South Dakota Agricultural College and Mechanical Arts.
“The museum started as a zoological collection in 1884,” the director said. “It was always a secondary path for a professor on campus.”
She added that around the 1960s, South Dakota State University President Hilton Briggs “gave the museum a ‘line item’ (in the university’s budget) and in 1967 made it the ‘University Museum and Heritages Center.’ It was a very odd spelling, but it was with an ‘s: heritages.’”
Prior to 1968 what passed for a museum was housed in a variety of locations. Then it was moved to Wenona Hall and opened to the public. In 1977 came the move to its present home. With its permanent home came an acknowledgement of its role and mission as a state institution.
“We are the official state museum for agricultural history in the state of South Dakota,” McCausland said. “That means the state historical society does not collect any artifacts regarding agriculture in South Dakota. They don’t have any tractors, any implements, any ranching equipment. They transfer that to us or they suggest donations to us.
“So it’s really important to us, our role. We’ve actually changed our mission.”
“Our mission is to inspire a passion for that diverse history, culture and science of agriculture in South Dakota. Our scope is to collect agriculture from the moment that humans domesticated and cultivated plants and animals in South Dakota to stay,” the director explained. “And it’s from border to border. We want to really collect the entire state’s history, not just one region.”
Historical integrity
McCausland also noted that everything that makes its way into the museum’s inventory must have “that tie, that historical integrity” that binds it to South Dakota. Additionally, the museum has shifted its artifacts-focus “toward preservation and less restoration.”
As an example, the director explained, “The tractor that has all its paint stripped off and it looks all shiny and new” has less value than “the tractor that has its original paint, its original wear marks, that has that story behind it. … It reflects the people who used it and the way it was used.”
The museum is funded by the board of regents as a department of South Dakota State University and has a full-time staff of five personnel.
Director McCausland is a North Dakota native. She grew up on a small sheep farm, where her father has also been practicing veterinary medicine since 1970. Smiling, she said, “That’s what paid the bills.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree from North Dakota State University, she pursued a master’s degree from Cardiff University in Wales.
“My mother’s side of the family is all Welsh,” McCausland said. “So I have anthropology, and museums were my majors and course work. I wanted to specialize in the culture in which I was raised; so I chose that degree program.”
Other than for two years after graduate school, she has worked at museums in North Dakota, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ontario, Canada.
She came to SDSU as museum director in 2014.
“I absolutely love this job,” she said.
Striving for excellence
The director said she and her staff “have made some amazing changes. We’re constantly having new programming and new exhibits. We’re really striving for that level of excellence to tell that story about the importance of agriculture in everyday lives.
“We have this great opportunity; because unlike other venues on campus or across the state, at the museum we see visitors from all over the world; we see SDSU students; we see school-age kids, pre-school, families with young children.
“With less than 2 percent of the population living on the farm, we have the opportunity to educate that other 98 percent about the importance of agriculture in their everyday lives. And we get to do it in a fun, innovative way.”
Getting down to the bare basics of that importance, McCausland pointed out that “everybody eats and most people wear clothes. So agriculture impacts them.”
Additionally, the museum can add history and culture to the equation.
“We want to talk about being informed about not only what we do today but also about what we’ve done in the past and how did we get to today.”
Noting how the past relates to the present, McCausland explained, “Everything, how we care for our soils to the use of wind energy is nothing new.
“We’ve been using wind energy in South Dakota prior to the REA (Rural Electrification Administration). They had wind generators and we have them on display here in the museum.”
The museum also takes note of the “culture of rural life.” McCausland said, “There’s folk traditions. There’s just a pattern of life, whether you grew up on a ranch and you all came together for branding, to threshing days, to Hutterite colonies, very much a specific sub-culture of North American culture. So we have a very unique fabric of culture.”
While she sees the museum doing a lot in keeping with its role and mission, the director sees a need for more space as an ongoing challenge.
“We’re limited to what we can display inside,” she said. “We have these amazing pieces that have never seen the light of day.”
A generous donor would be appreciated.
Located at 977 11th St. on the SDSU campus, the South Dakota Agricultural Heritage Museum is open Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. Winter hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday. The museum is closed on state holidays.
Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingsregister.com.
