HISTORY INTO ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY - Snite Museum of Art ...

THE FATHER LINDESMITH COLLECTION:
History, Anthropology, and Art
JOANNE M. MACK
Museum collections are built, in part, upon personal collections that have been
donated by the individuals who assembled them. Such donations often help shape
a museum’s exhibitions. Often lacking actual accounts and records, curators and
art historians can only imagine most collectors’ motives and the circumstances
surrounding the acquisition of objects that so intrigued them. Fortunately, there is no
need for such speculation or conjecture in the case of Father Eli John Washington
Lindesmith, whose voluminous records have all been archived. These include account
books detailing most of the items in his collection, his diaries, memoirs, letters (both
sent and received), lectures, sermons, photographs, and perhaps most important
of all, descriptive tags for every object and notes for every photograph, which he
attached to each item when he donated it.
In a March 1911 letter to Professor Henry Hyvernat of the Catholic University
of America in Washington, D.C., Father Lindesmith wrote that he had displayed
objects he obtained while serving as chaplain at Fort Keogh in Montana Territory,
but came to realize, after sending them to Ohio, that he could not care for them
properly. “I shipped my entire collection to Dungannon, Columbianna [sic] County,
Ohio,” he explained, “and placed it all in a large school room of St. Phillip’s church;
where the bishop stationed me as a pastor. People came from far and wide to see
the curiosities. I soon found I could not attend to it.” 1 In a letter to Professor J. H.
Edwards at the University of Notre Dame a dozen years earlier, he had asserted
that although the items were then not worth much, they would have great value a
hundred years hence. 2
Father Lindesmith correctly anticipated that his collection would someday be
respected for its historical relevance. By affixing an explanatory label to each item,
this foresighted collector was shedding light on aspects of America’s past. Because
he hoped future generations would learn from his holdings, he decided to donate
them to several Catholic educational institutions.
Lindesmith began dividing and disseminating the collection by giving about half of it
to the Catholic University of America in 1898; he probably had visited the school in
1888, not long after its founding. 3 In 1899 he donated approximately one-quarter of
his collection, including a recently painted full-length portrait of himself (opposite),
to the University of Notre Dame. 4 His diaries and memoirs note several visits to the
university. During one, in 1891, he was impressed by the campus post of the Grand
Army of the Republic, composed of faculty members. 5 Furthermore, he knew of the
Catholic Historical Collection in the Bishops’ Museum at the university because he
had donated a vestment to that collection in 1894. 6
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