IOW museum celebrating new look for its history

SMITHFIELD

The Isle of Wight Museum is proof that big - and old, unique and fascinating - things can come in small packages.

At about 3,500 square feet, perhaps small by museum standards, the museum i s a repository of hundreds of local artifacts offering a snapshot of IOW's history.

The museum has been closed since an October 2006 nor'easter's torrential rains flooded the building's basement where much of the archival collection was stored. Four feet of water soaked the museum's records, many of its artifacts and two exhibits.

On Saturday, the museum will celebrate its grand re-opening. Two years of effort from volunteers and staff revived the museum that's looking better than ever, according to Judy Hare Winslow, director of tourism for Isle of Wight County and Smithfield.

"This has afforded us a chance to make some changes and add some additional exciting opportunities," she said. "The museum has a lot of hometown appeal - and not every museum has a pet ham and the world's largest ham."

As the floodwaters receded, mold and mildew flourished in the soggy museum. "Artifact triage," as the museum folks called it, started immediately with the staff and a cadre of volunteers donning protective jumpsuits, respirators and rubber gloves to rescue what they could.

A ham of a tale

High on the rescue list was the salt-cured pet ham that was overlooked when its fellow hams were shipped out from P.D. Gwaltney and Co. 106 years ago. Gwaltney, a marketing savvy entrepreneur, adopted the ham as a pet symbol of the extraordinary shelf life of Gwaltney hams. He put a collar around the ham and traveled with it to trade shows.

Tracey Neikirk, museum curator, said that Gwaltney had some explaining to do when he tried to have the 5-pound ham stashed overnight in a Manhattan hotel vault.

The pet ham is just one ham in the museum's pork-packing exhibit that includes a 65-pound ham that was cured in 1955. The ham, from a 900-pound hog, weighed 90 pounds before curing. It has since aged with its peppered coating intact.

"It may not be the world's largest ham, but you'd be hard pressed to find a bigger one," Neikirk said.

The ham was not happy in cold storage at the Mariners' Museum where wet artifacts were kept to retard mold. Although country hams generally drip fat after curing, Neikirk said, the huge ham was oozing when it was taken out of storage. Once back in the IOW Museum, however, the ham's fat flow slowed.

It will be housed on the first floor of the museum in a custom wood and Plexiglas complete with a desiccate that will help keep the ham dry.

More than hams

Gwaltney also saved a peanut that he picked from an Isle of Wight field in 1890. It's been recognized by Ripley's "Believe It or Not" as the world's oldest peanut.

But you'll find more than peanuts and hams at the museum. Exhibits display artifacts dating from prehistoric ages, as well as the years when three Indian tribes - the Nansemond, the Nottoway and the Warraskoyack - lived in the county, as well as items from the glory days of steamboats plying the rivers and the Civil War.

A full-sized replica of an early 1900s general store tugs at memories and surprises those who have never seen a butter churn or a wooden ice chest full of glass bottles of drinks such as Pal Ade and Pepsi fountain syrup, which was sold to mix with your own carbonated water.

Among the new exhibits are items that may have been lost in the crush of other exhibits before. For example, a large Tuscan pottery olive oil jar - about 3 feet high - stands in front of a backdrop of an English wharf scene where the same type of jars waited to be loaded onto British ships headed for tropical climates where butter would turn rancid.

The jar floated ashore when a British ship sank off of Battery Park generations ago. Faint white lines girdling the jar indicate where a protective basket was to be woven to safeguard the pottery aboard a sailing ship.

"'Sisters living at Boykins Tavern used it to collect rainwater and then someone used it as a flowerpot before it was donated to us," Neikirk said.

The jug exhibits also includes other items - sugar cones and pewter - that would have come to Smithfield by ship in the 18th and 19th centuries when the town was a bustling port.

"Every single exhibit in the museum now corresponds to the SOL's (Standards of Learning mandated by the state)," Winslow said. "That took a huge amount of work and is a credit to our museum staff."

Get interactive

The museum also features "thumbs up" exhibits, touchable displays such as a vintage Sears catalogs that folks can finger through and a fragrant assortment of spices once used in pork packing.

The museum's redesign also moved the gift shop to a new setting near the front entrance. The docents' desk is there as well, conveniently located to answer questions about the town as visitors come in.

The visitors center is several blocks down the street with its own staff, but Winslow plans lots of cross training to better serve the public between the two facilities - just in case the refurbished museum inspires visitors to browse the rest of the county.

Phyllis Speidell, (757) 222-5556, phyllis.speidell@pilotonline.com