5 minute read
Moments to Remember
Discover a place where history meets here and now.
At Historic Frank G. Nifong Memorial Park, 2900 E. Nifong Blvd., history, architecture, art and theater combine to create a home for both arts and culture in the Columbia community. Originally part of a farmstead belonging to Slater and Margaret Lenoir, the 60-acre park is the site of the Boone County History & Culture Center and the Maplewood Barn Community Theatre.
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Inside the History & Culture Center’s 20,000 square feet, there are two exhibit spaces, a professional art gallery and a host of archived collections that hold the history of Columbia and Boone County.
“If you go around the country, counties the size of Boone County Logo and smaller almost never have 20,000 square feet to work with,” says Chris Campbell, executive director of the Boone County History & Culture Center. “So the people that built this space between 1985 and 1990 were very farsighted and understood that space would be extremely helpful in the decades to come. And, I wish I had more.”
Indeed, the center is bursting at the seams with collections and artifacts, Campbell says, and a committee is already looking at ways to increase space.
On the main floor, exhibits in the East Gallery rotate out every six to eight months; in the West Gallery they remain up to a year, March through February. Within these galleries, exhibits feature items and images from the center’s expansive collections in the vaults downstairs. Vaults are not open to the public, but they house a 500,000 glass-plate negative collection (1880s-1970) that is regularly mined for images and an extensive artifact collection that includes everyday items like vintage typewriters, farm implements, antique radios and rotary phones along with unique items like General Odon Guitar’s Civil War greatcoat.
At the other end of the building sits Montminy Art Gallery, a 2,800-square-foot professional commercial art gallery. The space features six major shows a year from local and national artists, as well as a six-concert season. On permanent display in the art gallery is the Chickering grand piano of John W. “Blind” Boone, an African American composer and musician of renown, born in 1864.
Throughout the park, historic buildings dot the landscape, four of which form the Village at Boone Junction, which are used for
The East Gallery Montminy Art Gallery
preservation and educational purposes. Originally built in 1909 at Worley Street and Garth Avenue, the McQuitty house is a shotgun house, well known in the African American community as it was built by an African American contractor and realtor in Boone County. It is unfinished, and the walls of the home are used for Black history exhibits. The Ryland house, from near Sturgeon, was built in 1890. It’s used as an exhibit space featuring furniture and other items from the era in which the home was built. The Easley Country Store replica will bring back memories for anyone who has recollection of an old-time country store. It is stocked with “merchandise” you might find on the shelves in the early 1900s. Lastly, the Gordon-Collins Log Cabin was relocated to the site from what is now Stephens Lake Park. The cabin was built by a Kentucky settler, David Gordon, and used as a temporary structure while building Gordon Manor. It’s also named for “Pop” Collins, a long-time groundskeeper at Stephens College who renovated the cabin while he worked at the college.
The Village at Boone Junction is open by appointment for a fee or during the Heritage Festival, held the third week in September, the
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Maplewood Barn Community Theatre
one weekend a year where tours of the buildings are free. During the festival, docents are on hand to share the history of the buildings and answer questions.
Just northwest of the village sits the Maplewood Barn, the seasonal summer home of Maplewood Barn Community Theatre. The original 133-year-old barn burned down in 2010, but was rebuilt with a few modern touches and is simply called “The Barn” by those who keep the shows running.
The theater has called the Barn home since 1973 and provided live community theater in an outdoor setting at the park.
“It feels like Maplewood Barn is a little less formal, a little more relaxed,” says Morgan Dennehy, Maplewood Barn Community Theatre president. “It’s an outdoor theater, so it’s a completely different experience. We don’t have air conditioning. You have to have dedication and real loyalty to go see a Barn show in the middle of Missouri July.” Logo In 2019, the cast did “White Christmas” in July—in fur-lined costumes ... during a heatwave. People came, even in the middle of that Missouri-hot show. “It takes a certain level of really loving to be outdoors and loving the Barn to really do a Barn show.”
The sense of community and the sense of family at the Barn has always been the same. Dennehy hears people talk about the Barn, pre-fire, with this nostalgic awe and thinks people still have that same feeling about the Barn.
“It gives us all an opportunity to step outside of ourselves,” she says, “and really connect with those people around us, connect with the people on stage. It gives us an opportunity to meet our neighbors, to interact with people we wouldn’t necessarily interact with on a normal basis. And it gives us this wonderful opportunity to express ourselves whether through being an audience member, being a volunteer, behind the scenes, on the stage, vocally, or even physically.”
Maplewood Barn Community Theatre typically does a four-show season and usually includes a comedy and a classic (most often Shakespeare because Shakespeare in the Park is a total thing). When they do Shakespeare, they give it their own bent. For example, “Much Ado About Nothing” in 2015 was set in Columbia, and instead of soldiers coming home from war, it was football players coming back from homecoming—complete with a backdrop of Jesse Hall and the Columns.
Neither does the audience.
For information on hours of operation and schedules, visit BooneHistory.org or MaplewoodBarn.com.
