Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The panorama exhibit in the Natural History Museum has a big secret: behind its mountain backdrop lies a 5-by-10 foot cave, filled with the signatures of past employees.
The cave, which Visitor Services Director Tristan Smith calls one of the best-kept secrets on campus, started out as a support structure for the panorama and existed even before Dyche Hall was built.
The signature tradition came soon after the museum’s completion. It was started by a student who helped build the exhibit, almost like a painter putting his signature at the bottom of his canvas, Smith said.
Photo Gallery
Inside the Cave
A photo gallery from inside the cave.
The panorama itself began as a display at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Its creator Lewis Dyche, a KU graduate and professor, spent more than 20 years gathering North American animals and designed the display to show his specimens in their natural habitats. When the fair closed for the night, Dyche would hide in the display’s cave to guard his animals.
The exhibit grew wildly in popularity while in Chicago and when Dyche returned to the University, it, along with the cave, found its home at the Natural History Museum, which was built in 1902 to house the University’s growing taxidermy collection.
Since then, Smith said he thought that employees who have put their personal marks on the wall have felt a certain kinship with Dyche or with the museum itself.
“Each person brings to it their own connection,” Smith said. “Whether it’s that you’ve done something to improve the museum or you just have a connection with the place.”
But employees have to wait until they quit before they can see the cave. Bobby Pulliam, a recent KU graduate who worked at the museum for three years, continued the tradition in July and became the latest to add his signature to the walls of the cave.
“It was actually really cool,” Pulliman said. “It’s kind of like this mythological place you hear about, because you aren’t actually allowed to go back there when you work there. But then after you quit working there, they take you back there and let you sign it.”
Synthia Somerhalder, a senior from Burlington and a current employee at the Natural History Museum, said she wouldn’t go in the cave until her last day at the museum. She said after she signed her name, she would finally feel like an official worker.
“It’s like the crowning achievement of my career,” Somerhalder said. “I’ll get to join the ranks of the men and women who came before me.”
More than 100 signatures have appeared since World War II and Smith said the names made a statement about the type of relationship workers have with the museum.
“It’s the theatrics — that tradition that if you’re in the theater, you go behind the curtain, and you almost always in any theatre see names, and I think that’s almost the closest thing I can liken it to,” Smith said. “It’s that same type of feel — very much more family than a workplace relationship.”
— Edited by Dana Meredith
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