William Swain Exhibit

The painting that inspired an exhibit

By the time I’m finished with the Gold Rush exhibit I’m sure you’ll all be pretty sick of hearing about it.  But it’s not only the most exciting thing going right now, it’s a great professional experience.  I never studied to be in museums, but I find I enjoy working on the exhibits as much as I do the archives. 

            One of the panels we got for the travelling exhibit is a painting of a miner’s cabin with miners carousing outside while one man is visible writing at a desk inside the cabin.  Neal looked at the painting and decided he’d build a miner’s shack to be part of an interactive exhibit.  Inside the shack we papered one wall with old newspapers and set a panel on “The Life of the Miner”.  One quote in the panel referred to William Swain, a peach farmer from New York who went across land to the gold fields of CA.  According to the quote, Swain wrote numerous letters back home to his wife Sabrina.  This raised my archival instincts and I went in search of William Swain and his letters.  Turns out they are archived at Yale’s Beinecke Library.  Yale has only digitized one journal entry- the first entry Swain wrote while packing his trunk to head to California.  This was a little disappointing since I was hoping for more entries and a few letters, but it was still something.  We printed out the entry as well as part of a letter and I transcribed them on the back of each page so people wouldn’t be scared off by the handwriting and would read the pages. 

Swain desk with letter and journal

            An entire corner of the museum suddenly became the William Swain corner.  The shack had quotes from Swain’s letters on the wall and a trunk we filled with artifacts Swain and other miners might have brought out with them- marbles, playing cards, a miner’s pan, an abacus, a jaw harp, fishing hooks, hardtack.  Little signs encourage kids to try and find what Swain would have used for work versus for fun.  Miner’s clothes hang on hooks on the wall and kids can try them on and have their picture taken.  A little wooden section has been filled with sand as if it was the outside of the cabin and we put shovels and pick axes out leaning against the cabin.  The painting that inspired the cabin hangs above that.  Then we set up a little desk and put Swain’s handwritten pages and the transcripts on them.  A little biography panel of Swain that I wrote hangs above the desk.

William Swain corner

Miner's shack

 My two favorite things (next to the journal entry and letter on the desk) are a map of the United States in 1849 and a picture frame on the desk.  The frame contains prints of daguerreotype images of Swain and his wife Sabrina.  It’s not an exact reproduction of the cased pictures Swain would have carried- he probably only had a cased picture of Sabrina with a velvet lining on the side opposite the picture.  But it’s really nice and I think it’s sweet to imagine William at the desk looking at the pictures while he wrote his letters to Sabrina.  It also does a good job of reminding people that the miners often left family behind.  One woman yesterday asked me if I knew if Sabrina took William back after his adventure, that’s how into she got, wanting to know what happened to the family after the gold fever wore off.  (In case you’re wondering, the answer is yes- Sabrina and their daughter Elizabeth, who was one year old when William left, did take him back and the couple had several more children.  Kids and grandkids for the rest of William’s life had to listen to his tales of life out in the gold fields.) 

William and Sabrina Swain

            The map is a cool old-fashioned looking map, showing states and territories as they stood in 1849.  I printed out little line drawing images of the means of transportation William used- steamer boat from Buffalo to Chicago, flat-bottomed river boat down to St. Louis and ox drawn covered wagons out to the Rockies.  A person walking across the Rockies (because not even oxen were dumb enough to cross the Rockies in spring) and then another ox wagon to the Yuba River in northern California and the gold fields.  I mounted the images on foam board and then the images onto the map to follow William’s path.  It’s really cool looking, pops out to people, and does a nice job of showing, not telling, how William travelled out West.

William Swain's Route

            Plenty of places would have just hung the panels and declared the exhibit open.  But we wanted our exhibit to be more than that.  We wanted to connect patrons with miners and their lives, to make something interactive for all ages and still educational.  We’re not finished with the exhibit yet, but as far as William Swain is concerned, I think we’ve accomplished what we set out to do.