Remembering the Mood Heritage Museum

The Mood Heritage Museum was established in 1978 after the renovation and renaming of Mood Hall, the men’s (and sometimes women’s) dorm, to Mood-Bridwell Hall, a multi-purpose building featuring faculty offices and classrooms. The Museum was curated by Dr. Edmund Steelman, an emeritus professor from the Religion and Philosophy department, and Dr. Judson Custer, an Education professor and the Vice President for Student Development and Services.

Although the Museum was located on campus, it was a partnership between the school and Georgetown Heritage Society. Georgetown Heritage Society was created after America’s Bicentennial celebration, an event in 1976 that sparked a nationwide interest in historical preservation.

After the formation of the Heritage Society in 1977, various meetings were held across Georgetown as the Society worked to establish a museum that would curate the history of Georgetown and Williamson County. However, they met frequently on campus in the atrium of Mood Hall and in the Cody Memorial Library, which led to their collaboration with Southwestern in the creation of the Museum, the first of its kind in Georgetown. Southwestern itself had an additional impetus to reflect on its origins, as it had just celebrated its own centennial as a single university in Georgetown in 1973.

The Mood Heritage Museum, as it was ultimately named, was split up into 3 different exhibit spaces, one dedicated to displaying Southwestern’s history, another dedicated to the history of Georgetown and Williamson County, and the final exhibit displayed miscellaneous artifacts submitted to the Museum by SU staff and faculty members. These items were all on rotation as the contributors donated or loaned their items, sometimes working together to highlight an overarching theme created by Dr. Steelman and Dr. Custer.

Looking back at those exhibits today, it becomes clear that many of the exhibits uncritically connected Anglo myths about the frontier and Southwestern’s history as a predominantly white institution established at a time in the 1870s-1890s that witnessed both the so-called “closing of the frontier” and the fall of Reconstruction and establishment of Jim Crow. The Museum’s Statement of Purpose encouraged this representation of history by, “fostering the study and preservation of the culture in the area, including its pre-history and its pioneer life.”

For example, in 1981 a “Hall of Honor” was created to bridge the two displays of Southwestern’s history and the history of Georgetown by “recognizing the contributions of five local pioneers to Southwestern University and Georgetown---Francis Asbury Mood, Dudley Snyder, John W Snyder, and Joseph and Elizabeth Morrow.”

Regarding the representation of Mood specifically, the exhibit provided very surface-level details of his life in the “sketch” it published in connection with the exhibit, written by none other than William Jones, the author of To Survive and Excel, the last major history written of Southwestern.

Jones’ vignette about Mood here emphasizes his work as a missionary and his work with the four Methodist root colleges – Rutersville, McKenzie, Wesleyan, and Soule – to create what we know today as Southwestern.

While Jones mentions his time as the Chaplain of the Confederate Army, his description removes the agency of his actions by suggesting that “he was commissioned” for the position, and further distances Mood from his agency in his role with the Confederacy by saying that Mood was in Liverpool raising funds when the Confederacy eventually collapsed.

While these more problematic actions are not necessarily celebrated, the fact that they are downplayed allows the exhibit to celebrate Mood as if what Dr. Ainsley Carry calls his “principal legacy” as the person who established Southwestern overshadows any other part of his much more complex legacy. Other Placing Memory entries grapple with the intricacies of his legacy more fully, but I found it pertinent to bring up here considering he is the namesake of both the Museum and the building it resides in, Mood-Bridwell Hall.

Alternatively, an example of a miscellaneous exhibit was Dr. Steelman’s submission that first year in 1978, where he displayed a variety of artifacts that formerly occupied his office. The eclectic collection included arrowheads and flint stones discovered around Williamson County, a case of Native American hunting tools, and some fossils which were found in the San Gabriel riverbed. In a move that you often see in older “Natural History” museums, he put fossils and Native American artifacts together as relics from a vanished past and labeled this portion of the exhibit “Old Williamson County Dwellers.”

The Museum housed exhibits of various topics like this for almost two decades. By the early 1990s, Dr. Steelman and Dr. Custer were no longer here, and the Museum sat there in the southwest corner of the first floor of Mood-Bridwell Hall, now itself a relic made of relics.

Then, in 1994, amidst another renovation of Mood-Bridwell, it was proposed that the Museum would be relocated to the McCook-Crain building.
However, after the displays were packed away, the Museum never reappeared on the other side of campus. Instead, to this day, objects from the Museum remain scattered around campus, from the display cases on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building to various catalogued items stored within SU Archives & Distinctive Collections.

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Examining the presence of the Mood Heritage Museum and its inspiration from the Bicentennial celebration leads me back to the question of how history is remembered and represented on a collective level at Southwestern, particularly how Southwestern remembers its relationship to the previous “dwellers” of Georgetown and Williamson County.

As a collaboration with the Georgetown Heritage Society, there were experiences the Mood Heritage Museum found critical for representing the history of Georgetown. For example, in 1982, the Museum documented the growth, decline, and renewal of downtown Georgetown by displaying various antiques from businesses on the Square, and highlighting individuals like C.S. Belford and C.S. Griffith, as they were responsible for building a lot of the homes and businesses of Georgetown in the early 1900s. This exhibit was tied back to Southwestern by highlighting how these two also aided in the development of the campus during that time period as well, affirming a spatial-historical linkage between SU and Georgetown through their simultaneous growth in the 1910s-1920s.

This spatial-historical connection between Southwestern and Georgetown is heightened by the placement of the Museum itself. The Georgetown Heritage Society held many meetings on the SU campus, temporarily claiming that space as part of Georgetown. This sentiment was carried on through The Mood Heritage Museum as it was partially owned by the Heritage Society. Therefore, despite its location on campus and its operations also being run by SU staff, I argue that this historical connection through places like the Museum actively maintained a social and cultural connection between Southwestern students, staff, and faculty, and the wider Georgetown population.

Through my research for other Placing Memory entries, I started to see a shift in the mid 1990s to the early 2000s where fewer Georgetown community-oriented events were hosted on the SU campus and fewer SU events were hosted in spaces considered more a part of the wider Georgetown community. Maintaining my prior argument, I suggest this shift in the placement of events marked a cultural shift in the divide between Southwestern and Georgetown right at the time that the Mood Heritage Museum lost its home in Mood-Bridwell.

I think this is more than a coincidence. After the unofficial closure of the Mood Heritage Museum in 1994, the Williamson Museum was opened just off the Square in 1997, the first of multiple organizations seeking to preserve and display the history of Georgetown and Williamson County, without the organizational influence of SU.

With this context, I suggest that the closure of the Mood Heritage Museum was a part of this cultural shift between Georgetown and SU. Despite the joint “town and gown” nature of the Museum, as a part of the physical campus space, it probably always represented SU’s perspective on local history through its various exhibits.

Identifying this distinction within the goals of the Georgetown Heritage Society and the goals of Southwestern with the Museum led me towards a complex question: what is the difference between the history of Georgetown and the history of Southwestern? Writing this entry and other entries for the Placing Memory project, it has become clearer to me how these two histories used to be more intertwined but have diverged over the past few decades.

Today, Georgetown and Williamson County have their own museums and heritage groups dedicated to preserving and curating the history and memory of the whole community surrounding and including Southwestern, and Southwestern’s Archives focuses more exclusively on preserving and curating the history and memory of Southwestern.

While the closing of the Mood Heritage Museum did not indicate a loss in SU’s ability to represent its history, recognizing the space as one of the many ways the institution has represented its history in the past is an important topic to include in the Placing Memory project, where we strive to understand how experiencing the past in the present through these different mediums influences our social and cultural expectations for the present and the future.

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