Museum uncovers aged trunk’s origins
When people think of museum collections, images of dinosaur bones and famous artwork might come to mind.
While Spokane’s Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture has its share of precious items, it also collects the everyday items that tell the story of this region and its people. The clothing. The kitchen appliances. Even the lunchboxes.
Among the more than 65,000 items in the MAC’s collection is a trunk that immigrated to the United States from Norway in 1882 with its owner, Kristine Ellingsdatter Nyhus. One can only imagine what the 24-year-old woman packed into the trunk when she came to America with her husband and two children.
A donor gave the hand-painted trunk to the museum in 1953, but its story was locked away – literally – until last year. The name “Kristine Ellingsdatter Nyhus” was painted on the front, along with the year 1849, but the museum didn’t know who she was or the significance of that date. Curators also could see that other words and a number – another name and date, perhaps – were painted under Kristine’s.
“(The trunk) was locked, and we couldn’t find the key,” says Marsha Rooney, the MAC’s senior curator of history. “Nobody could remember how it got here.”
When the museum accepts an item into its collection, the item is assigned what’s called an accession number, and museum staff members file historical information about each item by number.
But the trunk’s accession number couldn’t be found on its exterior, and without a key to look for it inside, researchers didn’t know where to start.
Finally, Rooney says, they picked the lock and found the code, handwritten in black ink, in an interior compartment.
“It gave us the clue we needed to find the paperwork,” she says.
That led to the donor’s name: Hilda Benn Emang, widow of Ole Olsen Emang, one of Kristine Ellingsdatter Nyhus’ sons.
By studying death records, corresponding with a museum curator in Norway and translating parish records written in the Norwegian language of the 19th century, MAC volunteer Kathy Holte uncovered more about the people behind the trunk’s history.
Holte believes the words underneath Kristine’s name could be her mother’s name, Eli Olufsdatter Hoel, as it was common for mothers or grandmothers to pass trunks on to their daughters.
As for the dates – 1875 next to Kristine’s name and 1849 underneath it – Holte believes they are the years the women became engaged to be married because each date is a few years before the women’s wedding dates, 1878 and 1851, respectively.
“It is most likely a bridal trunk (brudekiste, as it is called in Norway), where young women kept their dowry that they were making and collecting during the time before the wedding,” Kari-B. Vold Halvorsen, a curator at the Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo, Norway, wrote in an e-mail to Holte.
The research uncovered other information:
Kristine was a seamstress. Her husband, John Olsen Emang, was a logger. The couple had at least two more children after coming to America.
The floral paintings on the trunk’s exterior are a style called “rosemaling,” and it was popular to paint bridal trunks in that manner during the 19th century. If a family could afford it, skilled painters “covered the chests lavishly with intricate scrolls and blooms,” according to a book on the topic by Margaret M. Miller and Sigmund Aarseth. If they couldn’t, the family painted the trunks themselves in a more primitive style, as can be seen on the inside of Kristine’s trunk.
While Holte’s research answered many questions, it also raised new ones. Where did the trunk’s owners enter the United States when they emigrated? What brought them to Spokane?
The trunk’s donor has since passed, as has her daughter, June House. Rooney hopes other descendents of the Emangs will contact the museum one day with more information about the family, as well as photographs.
Holte’s research added to the museum’s records, fleshing out an otherwise mysterious item’s past. But to Rooney, it’s about more than just data for the files.
“People often think about objects just as objects. That’s a beautiful trunk,” for example, she says. “But we try to find things that represent a broad spectrum of the different people who have lived in the region. … I see us as collecting the stories of the people here.”