Once at Mia: Room for wonder

It’s hard to know what these schoolchildren—boys standing, girls on the floor—thought of the Charleston Drawing Room and the adjacent dining room, moved to Mia from one of the finest colonial mansions in Charleston, South Carolina. The period rooms opened in 1931 as a memorial from the Bell family. Judging from the setup and the clothing, this photo was likely taken soon after, at the height of the Great Depression.

The mansion was built for Colonel John Stuart, a Scotsman who served as superintendent of Indian affairs in the southern colonies at a time when eastern Native Americans were being decimated. He was one of the richest men in town and a slave-owner, with 15,000 acres and some 200 slaves to work them. None of that mattered in polite society, of course, in the 1700s or when the rooms came to Mia.

“Colonel Stuart’s guests would have enjoyed to the fullest the warm hospitality for which he was famous,” the museum said of the rooms in 1951. “It was to preserve a record of such a cultivated and reasonable age that Mr. and Mrs. Bell presented these rooms in memory of Mr. Bell’s parents.”

As the final installment of the 2015 Once at Mia series, a year-long look into the museum archives in celebration of Mia’s 100th birthday, this story outlines some of the incredible changes in society and museums over the last century. Mia is now a part of history itself, an artifact like any other. And yet its story is still being written.

The period rooms are currently being reinvigorated, an initiative called Living Rooms that is reanimating these spaces through alternative uses, mini-exhibitions, and other ways to connect the past to the present. The Charleston rooms will be reinstalled next fall to incorporate African and Native American voices. These rooms are not as fixed in time as they would seem—like everything in the museum, they are as fluid as our perspective.