[accessibleimage] Michigan's trash is Smithsonian's treasure

 Michigan's trash is Smithsonian's treasure

 Wednesday, October 27, 2004
 By Judy Putnam
 Lansing Bureau 

 LANSING -- Once slated for the trash heap, a piece of
history from the
 shuttered Michigan School for the Blind's Lansing campus is
now in the
 hands of a curator at the Smithsonian Institution. 

 Nine wooden architectural models from the 1930s are being
stored in
 Washington, D.C., for eventual display, after alumni
contacted the national
 museum. 

 Used by generations of Michigan's blind children to
understand what
 structures look like, the "tactile models" are believed to
have been made by
 employees of the Works Progress Administration, a Great
Depression
 federal employment project. 

While a few schools for the blind have similar models in
their school's museums, the Michigan collection could be the
largest of its type in the
country, Katherine Ott, a curator at the Smithsonian's
National Museum of American History, said in a phone
interview. 

"It's the largest and most significant that I know of,'' she
said. "It would have been a tragedy (to throw them out).
They're great cultural artifacts.'' 

The painted models are of a Victorian house, a monument
resembling the Lincoln Memorial, the Tower of Babel, a
skyscraper, a model of
 Mount Vernon, a chateau, a cottage, a paddle-wheel boat and
a corn crib. They are 2 feet to 4 feet high, on bases that
are 3 by 4 feet. 

"They're wonderful. They're really great in terms of
history, in the history of education, the history of people
with disabilities, the history of
blindness, the history of civic life at the middle of the
20th century and what sighted people wanted blind kids to
learn,'' Ott said. 

She declined to put a dollar figure on the items, which may
be used in exhibits about the education of people with
disabilities and in
behind-the-scenes tours of stored artifacts. 

J.J. Jackson, a 1968 graduate of the Michigan School for the
Blind, contacted Ott two years ago after hearing from the
school's alumni
association that the long-forgotten models were to be
tossed. 

He recalls learning about buildings by touching the models. 

"We can't see the Empire State Building. Even if I walk up
to it, I can only touch a piece of it,'' he said. 

The state once served 300 students a year at the School for
the Blind, but the numbers started dwindling in the '70s as
mainstreaming took hold.
Blind students today are educated in their home districts. 

Gwen Botting of Ionia, president of Michigan Parents of
Children With Visual Impairments, said she's not heard of
similar models to help blind
students today, but they're a good idea. She said she often
seeks out replicas in gift stores when she travels with her
fifth-grader to give him an
idea of what buildings or statutes look like. 

The models were left behind when the school merged with the
Michigan School for the Deaf in Flint in 1995 and the
Lansing campus was
closed. 

They were stored in a former residential center on the
campus. At one point, alumni said a charter school leasing
the property put them inside the
school's drained indoor swimming pool, along with band
uniforms and trophies. 

In the past two or three years, the models were stored in
the campus maintenance building, which is still run by the
Michigan Department of
Education, according to Martin Ackley, department spokesman. 

Ackley said the school's alumni association was offered the
models a few years ago after the Michigan Historical Center
turned them down. 

The state museum already had two of the models, a copy of
the U.S. Capitol and a house, in storage, said Scott Peters,
collections historian.
The museum simply had no room to store the rest, Peters
said. The museum has a 1920s-era Red Crown gas pump from the
school grounds
and a 1930s-era Braille typewriter from the school on
display. 

The state archives also has paper records dating back to
1880 on the school's operations, as well as photos and
confidential students records. 

After Jackson and another alum, Marie Reh, arranged photos
to be sent, the Smithsonian expressed interest in the rest
of Michigan's models. It
took until July, nearly two years after the initial contact,
for the museum to hire a packer to collect them. 

"We continually were told that if we didn't get them out of
there, they were going to have to trash them,'' Jackson
said. "We were luckily able to
convince the powers that be not to throw them away.'' 

In addition, the Smithsonian took a band uniform and a clip
board that uses wires to help a blind person write in a
straight line. 

Although Ackley said a few models not selected by the
Smithsonian were still stored at the maintenance building,
alumni reported that the models
are gone, possibly thrown out. 

Ott said the remaining models were broken, incomplete or of
purely local interest, such as a copy of Fort Dearborn, a
19th-century fort near
Chicago in the former Michigan Territory. 

Reh, a 1972 graduate of the school, said she doesn't want to
know what happened to the rest of the models, which included
a cathedral and a
castle. 

She said alumni couldn't take them because they're so big,
not something to be displayed on a mantel or coffee table. 

"I was very pleased that I could get somebody to take that
many of them. We tried hard to find a home that wanted
them,'' she said.

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