...at the South Carolina State Museum
Only 5-10% of the items that the South Carolina State Museum has is out on display at any given time. 90%+ remains in storage. Think about just how much stuff you see out on SCSM’s four floors – so, yeah, they have 9x that in their archives. (For perspective, the Smithsonian only displays 3% of their possessions.)
Most of what is in storage is donated. The SCSM does buy some stuff if they really want it with funding granted by the state legislature.
Even cooler? Storage is hidden away in the museum behind trap doors and through secret entrances.
So when we got a tour of SCSM’s storage archives, our inner child was dropping its jaw.
It all started with the SCSM’s newest Fill in the Gap exhibit, in which they bring out items from their archives every five years to display + ask the public to “fill in the gaps” of their collection by bringing old/significant/just plain cool items to add to their archives. This year’s exhibit (open now until Feb. 2019) includes an “All About Columbia” Monopoly-style board game and a whale skull. Whoa.
The exhibit items sparked our interest to see more of the hidden gems that are tucked away inside SCSM’s storage “vaults,” if you will – and we found 5 of the coolest + strangest items in storage at the South Carolina State Museum.
We’re talking vintage technology, pop culture stuff, 70 million-year-old jaws. Hard to believe that some of these have been sitting here in Columbia for decades.
Iron Lung ⚙
In the technology section of SCSM’s storage, we were confronted with hundreds of artifacts like a Civil War-era voting machine (like the new Rich Co absentee ballot box, but prettier?), a vintage hair curler, and three historically-significant chairs: a dentist’s office chair from the first female dentist in S.C., a “shoo-fly” chair that would swat away flies when manually powered by your legs, and a chair made in Columbia specifically for (and sat in, assumedly) by FDR.
But the coolest thing we found was a vintage Iron Lung – those machines with climb-in chambers made in the 1930s-50s to help Polio-survivors breathe. (Remember that recent headline about the guy still living in one?)
Turns out, Iron Lungs were made right here in Columbia. This one was made in 1960.
James Brown’s red sparkly coat 🕺
James Brown – the “Godfather of Soul” singer/performer and S.C. native – donated a red, sequined coat to the SCSM in 1999 before he passed away in 2006. He was known for his wild performances: dancing, stripping down to only his pants and vest, then having a band member come drape a coat on top of him. Dramatic. We love it.
SCSM has a massive clothing storage area, featuring clothes donated by noteworthy S.C. natives like Vanna White (Wheel of Fortune), Kristen Davis (Charlotte on “Sex and the City”), Bill Pinckney (performer/singer) + several more. There’s also a whole separate room of military uniforms. And guess what they have the most of? (What do people keep to “pass down”?) Wedding dresses and Baptismal gowns.
Einstein bottle cap mosaic + human hair art 🖼
Little known fact: the SCSM has one of the biggest collections of S.C. art in the state with ~4,000 pieces total. The collection has pieces that date all the way back to the 1500s.
The art storage room we toured was all 2-D art. They don’t have much contemporary art, so we got to see one of the pieces they *do* have – a mosaic of Einstein made with vintage soda bottle caps in 2015 by Charleston artist Molly B. Right.
A “brother” piece, Sir Isaac Newton, is on display in the museum’s Robert B. Ariail Telescope Gallery.
We also saw a “Friendship Wreath” piece made with human hair in Hartsville in 1850. That was a thing. The art medium goes back all the way to the Egyptians.
Whale skull 🐋
The naturalist section of storage was probably my and Sam’s favorite part. We got to see a 3.5 million-year-old Baleen whale skull that was unearthed from the Cooper River and brought into the museum in 1979. ‘Nuff said.
The curator explained to us what the gashes in the bones were (at least one tiger shark) and that, with it, they got 40-50 different kinds of animals like scallops that were around the whale’s bones on the ocean floor.
We also saw a giant whale vertebra, a lot of ancient shark teeth, a sea turtle that SCSM is holding for the Federal Government, dolphin skulls, some 520 million-year-old fossils from areas like Batesburg-Leesville, and a Wyoming elk skull for comparison purposes – because elk used to be in S.C. until the 1750s.
Plus, a giant rocks and minerals donation that their team was currently processing. That big, gold-looking hunk is Pyrite – a.k.a. Fool’s Gold.
Take the tour 🎥
Ready to explore, yourself? Smash that play button. 👇
The reasons for the limited display of SCSM’s items are that:
- They just don’t have enough space to display everything, and
- a lot of their items are hundreds or even thousands of years old, so they have to keep them in great condition – hence the temperature + humidity-controlled storage archives. The staff says they need to keep the things they have in great condition so people hundreds of years from now can see them in the same condition.
Everything in storage is numbered, and every number is logged in a database of every. single. thing. in the museum. That’s a lot of data.
But they’re always trying to add even more to their collection – art, science stuff, cultural artifacts, historical items – they have all of those things, and want to fill in the gaps of what they don’t have.
So if you have something related to South Carolina that you think would be of value to the museum (and that you don’t want to pass down in your family), let them know. It could end up on display at the SCSM hundreds of years from now. Talk about leaving a legacy in Soda City.
