Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2008 - (Page 62) The 62 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2008 opened in the early 1900s, they immediately became two of New Orleans’ premier museums, and contained a variety of exhibits that featured Louisiana’s natural history and its military history. The two attractions were not the only, nor the first museums in New Orleans. In the 1800s, a number of attractions called themselves museums in the Crescent City. But, whereas today the word museum conjures up images of valuable artifacts and artwork, in the 19th century, museums were often a combination of curiosity shop, wax figure gallery, musical performance space, menagerie, and touring circus company. The existence of such attractions forms an interesting and very odd sideshow to the history of museums in New Orleans and the United States. In the 1800s, every major city had similar curiosity Louisiana State Museum celebrated its one-hundredth birthday recently. When the Cabildo and Presbytere exhibits. P.T. Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan (18411865) is perhaps the most famous of these attractions, as it featured people like Tom Thumb, and also natural history exhibits and dioramas. Many other similar museums featured an art gallery, exhibitions of historic artifacts, zoological displays, dioramas of significant events, exhibitions of oddities, and musical performances, all of which are installation and program techniques used today. The New Orleans city directories and newspapers of the period provide information on the early museums of the city. Vannuchi's Museum, located near the corner of St. Charles and Poydras streets, took out large advertisements in the directories of the 1860s. Formerly owned by Dan Rice, known as the “king of clowns,” the Vannuchi site was destroyed by fire in May of 1855, but Mr. Vannuchi reopened later that year. Over 200 wax figures were exhibited, many of which moved by internal mechanisms. LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/
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