All Roads Lead to Needham!

Sometimes I try to avoid museums while I am on vacation, but this year there were too many good opportunities to miss. And in a couple of cases, those museums led me right back “home.”

I have been enjoying a lovely vacation for the past couple of weeks, road tripping up to upstate New York, and later to New Hampshire and Maine. Sometimes I try to avoid museums while I am on vacation, but this year there were too many good opportunities to miss. And in a couple of cases, those museums led me right back “home.”

The first was the amazing Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY.  Seriously – if you are up in that area, don’t miss it.  I am not going to go into all of the amazing activities and exhibits (except to mention that though Michael and I haven’t played real pinball since college, I can still whupp him pretty comprehensively). The Strong is also the home of the National Toy Hall of Fame, and of the brand-new World Video Game Hall of Fame. My kids knew nearly all of these games. I learned that I still stink at Pac-Man, but split even with Michael on Pong.

One of the featured exhibits was an anniversary showcase of the game Age of Empires. I had never played it, so most of this exhibit was irrelevant to me, until I came upon the panels of concept artwork – damn! These looked familiar. The concept designs for the new upgrade – castles, knights, warriors, etc – were straight out of Needham’s own NC Wyeth. The Empires artists reproduced the style, the use of light and color, even the brushwork.  While old-style representative art is nearly obsolete for illustration, it has found a new life in this newest of media. An interactive video game would have been well outside of Wyeth’s ability to conceptualize, but the use of such images to create a comprehensive design world would have been right up his street. Nothing good is ever lost.

The second highlight was the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, NY, to finally meet my old friend, the Cardiff Giant in – um – person. The Cardiff Giant was one of the great frauds of 19th-century archaeology.  Long story short – In October 1869, two workmen digging a well on the farm of William Newell of Cardiff, NY, unearthed a 10-foot long gypsum figure of a discretely-naked man. The Cardiff Giant, as he became known, was touted as a petrified ante-Diluvian fossil man. He was displayed for weeks (at great profit) in upper NY state. A syndicate of businessmen soon bought it for $30,000 and began touring it throughout the cities of Syracuse and Albany.  Questions were soon asked, and by December the Giant had gone from being “A New Wonder” to being a recognized fraud. The mastermind of the fraud was a cigar maker from Binghamton named George Hull.  Hull, who was an atheist, had gotten into an argument with a revivalist preacher about the Biblical text, “there were giants in the earth in those days” (Gen. 6:4). He created the fraud to ridicule established religion (and, not least, to make a profit from it). William Newell was his distant cousin, and was in on the fraud (and the payoff). There is more to the story – History.com has a good summary.

So why was I so eager to see him? As I said, Mr Cardiff was an old and familiar friend.  When I was in grad school, we used to teach the Cardiff Giant case. The 1860s were a volatile time in science.  The notion of evolution was quite new (On the Origin of Species was published only 10 years before), and the rubrics of scientific analysis and proof were in their infancy. The educated western world was still reeling between the Genesis and Darwinian paradigms, and all sorts of new theories were being proposed and tested. In its day, the notion of a gypsum fossil man was not as preposterous as it is now to us. He was a great case study for the class, and one we used often.

And why else? Because, as I often say, All Roads Lead to Needham.  William Emerson Baker was building his famous estate in Needham during this period.  Baker, who was intellectually curious if not always rigorous, created and displayed a helpmeet for the Cardiff Giant, known (naturally) as Mrs Cardiff.  Mrs Cardiff (who was, as Les Crumbaker noted, “as heard-hearted as [the Cardiff Giant], but nowhere near as large”), was fashioned out of chalk.  She was a cruder representation than Mr C, with little detail other than the form of the body.  Mrs C reclined in one of Baker’s underground grottoes, known as the Smugglers’ Cave.  Smugglers’ Cave was one of Baker’s creepier creations.  It was dimly lit by the murky light that filtered through the glass panels of the Crystal Tower, on the ground above. Grotesque faces were carved into the high-vaulted stone walls. Huge hands reached out from the crevices to greet you, but only on closer inspection did you see the cloven hooves. Small elf-like creatures with large staring eyes populated the nooks and hidden corners. Finally, at the end of the cave were the iron bars that separated the Smugglers’ Cave from the Octagonal Bear Pit – but because of the burst of blinding sunlight at this point, you saw the bears but not the bars, leading you to think at first that you had made a wrong turn right into the bears’ den!

Mrs Cardiff did not dwell among good company. Along with the grotesque faces and demonic hands, she also shared her grotto with Boss Tweed, Punch, and four of the Forty Thieves.  Baker, who was an avid connoisseur of humbug, created one of his own, with the subtle implication that Mrs C was a fraud and she knew it. Why else would she reside among the damned?