Building the Collection: An Object Comes Home

This past Sunday, I came in to work to help with our monthly family programming series. It was going to be a good day - we were engaging our visitors through portraiture, connecting to the exhibition we had on view (The Struggle and the Glory - The American Experience, work by Austin-based artist Cornelius Carter). The artist would be on hand, and we encouraged all our visitors to stop for a bit and paint a portrait of their own.

My day took a 90-degree turn when I realized I’d left my phone at home, not a total disaster but I think we’ve all gotten pretty used to knowing what time it is…being able to take photos…and generally stay connected wherever we are…through these mini-computers we carry in our pockets. I went upstairs to my work computer to let my husband know he’d have to call the office if he needed me and found a series of text messages sent to the office phone rather than to my cell, starting at 8:30AM that morning. 

Charles Peveto, one of our Advisory Council members, had been contacted about a photo album…priced to sell…and was I interested? Five hours later, it didn’t seem like I was interested, not having replied (but he thought he was sending to my cell phone, not work). I scrolled through the thread to catch up and realized what he had found…an 1869 photo album that included Andrew Neill (one of the people for whom our site is named) as well as his first wife Agnes AND the memorial announcement of her death from yellow fever in 1867.

I immediately responded that yes of course we were interested, and five minutes later I was out the door, dropping the event at the Museum on the rest of the staff, and on my way to Uncommon Objects, an Austin antiques shop, to meet Charles and to see the album. While we had seen the photographs before, we did not own copies. And we had never seen the memorial announcement. 

This acquisition is significant for the NCHM not just because the people included are connected to our site, but because up to now, we have not had the opportunity to acquire anything touched by a member of the Neill family. The Neills were long gone and their direct family line had died out decades before the Neill-Cochran House Museum was established. We are in touch with some lateral descendants (and, serendipitously, one of those descendants visited the Museum for the first time in over 20 years on the same day we acquired the photo album), but we have been unable to bring any original artifacts into our collection…until now.

I asked Charles how he even came to know of the photo album. He is a preservationist, and a collector, but I think of him more as a collector of visual arts. He visits Uncommon Objects regularly, though, and they know that he is interested in old photographs. This album - which includes photographs of many other people besides the Neills - caught the dealer’s attention because of the memorial card, and so it was of Agnes Neill that the dealer spoke when she called Charles. The Neill name immediately caught his attention, thanks to his relationship with the Museum, and he knew we needed to see it.

As we welcome this new object into our collection, I am reminded how much of life is luck. This artifact was sitting in a shop four miles from the Museum, and it was by luck that it made its way to Austin in the first place. 

But to luck we must add community. It is thanks to our relationship with Charles…and to his relationship with the store… that we came to know of the photo album, which otherwise would have passed through Austin like a ship in the night. We never even would have known we had missed an opportunity. And it gives me hope that more objects and histories connected to our site will continue to come home to us in the years to come.