MOMCC in Kansas City

Yesterday I returned from three days in Kansas City, KS, where I attended the Spring MOMCC conference (Midwest Open-Air Museums Coordinating Council). Not only was I able to enjoy three days without looking at any snow, I was able to spend time with employees and volunteers from a variety of other museums and historical societies. Each spring and fall since I began working at Living History Farms, I’ve watched some of my coworkers head off to MOMCC and return excited about the people they’d spent time with and the workshops they attended. I was excited when my supervisor told me she wanted to send me this year. MOMCC ended up being a very different experience than I anticipated. A lot was packed into the three days, so the following are just a few highlights.

The conference was hosted by Mahaffie Stagecoach Stop & Farm Historic Site. (This is the only intact stagecoach stop left on the Santa Fe Trail.) On Thursday I took a slat sunbonnet workshop. I started sewing it while I was there, but it’s only about half finished. We were able to look at several historic sunbonnets while we worked on ours to see the variety of things that were done with them. My favorite bonnet was the doll slat sunbonnet, which was constructed precisely how we were making ours – just smaller! We also read some primary accounts of mid-nineteenth century women talking about how annoying it was to wear this large bonnet, with wooden slats in the brim to make it stand straight out from their faces, but how very practical it was at the same time.

Friday I attended workshops on the different costumed interpretation traditions, the history of “Bleeding Kansas,” and the importance of your museum’s mission in planning programming. I also went to the foodways, clothing/textile, and artisans resource groups. Saturday I went to workshops on how to incorporate research into your interpretation and on how to fold and pack nineteenth-century clothing for travel without it getting all rumpled and wrinkled. This is quite the feat if you’ve ever seen some of the fancy 1870s overskirts people wear!

Friday night we toured Mahaffie and rode in their reproduction stagecoaches. We crammed five women into our stagecoach, and it was quite cozy. I couldn’t even sit back in my seat. I can’t imagine traveling any sort of distance in one! My friend Lucy and I spent a lot of time in the kitchen looking at their cookbooks, several of which we have at our museum, and exclaiming over their tiny woodstove that they were managing to bake biscuits in. It certainly made me thankful for the large six-burner woodstove I get to cook on at Living History Farms. We discovered that they had a round woodpile also! We take great pride in our round woodpile at LHF, so I took a picture of Lucy next to it just as two Mahaffie interpreters rounded the corner. The gentleman proceeded to give us a hard time about it, saying we were only taking the photos to showoff to our co-workers how much better our woodpile was than theirs. They threatened to confiscate my camera later in the evening over it too! Honestly, I just thought it was neat that they also had a round woodpile, although it is true that ours is about four times bigger than theirs. However, they justified its size by explaining that they just butchered four pigs, so they had to burn through a lot of it. It was much bigger several weeks ago.

After several days of talking with other museum folk about where they work, I must say I am glad that I work at LHF. I love my museum, and I am thankful for my place there.