The Chippewa Valley Museum's outgoing director Susan McLeod (left)
and incoming director Julie Bunke.

Historical exhibits – and not those who create them – are the reason people go to museums. That doesn’t make curators, archivists, and others unimportant: In fact, their behind-the-scenes efforts are critical to how we understand the past – and the present.

For three decades – nearly three-quarters of the institution’s life – Susan McLeod has been in charge of Eau Claire’s Chippewa Valley Museum. In early January, McLeod handed the reins to incoming museum director Julie Bunke. During her 30-year tenure, McLeod oversaw the literal and figurative expansion of the museum, taking it from the era when glass cases of carefully classified objects were de rigueur to the age of interpretation, when stories of the past are told through multiple narrative threads with objects, images, and multimedia, as in the museum’s latest centerpiece exhibit, “Changing Currents.”

McLeod was a transplant from Kansas – via Duluth – when she arrived in Eau Claire in 1983. The very next year, her work on a difficult grant application helped her land the job of museum director. Since then, she has integrated herself into the history and culture of the community, spearheading efforts such as The Good Life, an extensive study of the county’s cultural landscape and how it can be celebrated and magnified.

On the eve of her retirement – which McLeod explains will see her continue to be involved in community affairs – Volume One sat down with McLeod to talk about the role museums play in our culture, what Eau Claire’s attitude really is, and which lumber legend she’s imagined strolling down Water Street with.

VOLUME ONE: You began your career at a cultural center, The Depot, in Duluth, but you’ve spent 30 years in Eau Claire. What kept you here so long?

MCLEOD: When I came here, (I liked) the fact that it was a self-contained community, it’s not the suburb of something. I’m very oriented to community things, I like to be involved, I always think that culture is a huge factor of quality of life, I think I can influence quality of life, so there was that possibility. I’m very interested in how you can organize something and get it to happen, and that was my role in Duluth, and that was my role here. And also, people were very positive about the community. If you said maybe we could do this, people would be like, “I don’t know anything about that, but if you think we can get the money for it, I think we can do it.” And you would do it, you would not talk yourself out of it. I love the history; even in the arts I was always interested in the social history, the cultural history side of it, and that is this expanded.

You talk about people being willing to do things and try things here. That’s interesting, because Eau Claire also has a reputation for sometimes dragging its feet about certain projects.

If you think this is a negative community, you’ve never lived in one that really was. (Laughter.) I think Eau Claire does think it can do things for itself and it does do them, but there have been key times in the past when people have been kind of like, “No that’s just too much. We can’t do that.” But of late I think there’s sort of a new era developing, and there are ways of working on things that maybe didn’t work so much in the past. And it’s not that they haven’t been coming all this time.

If you think this is a negative community, you’ve never lived in one that really was. I think Eau Claire does think it can do things for itself and it does do them, but there have been key times in the past when people have been kind of like, “No that’s just too much. We can’t do that.”

What was this institution like 30 years ago?

The museum always had professional design input, so even though it was – and is – a local or regional community museum, it wasn’t like many because it always had professional design. And so it always looked very nice, but in other ways it was more of a traditional, local history museum in that you went case by case and each case was kind of a different topic: Here’s the platform with our car, and here are pretty dresses, and so forth. The people that founded the museum, they were professionals themselves, and they were professionally oriented for the museum from the very beginning, so one of the ambitions of the board when I arrived that they told me about was if the museum could become an accredited museum, which is a voluntary process for museums offered by the American Alliance of Museums. ... Just because of the particular nature of this institution, it was a community-based museum that was professionally oriented, so that suits my personality. There was already an educational program and a relationship with the school district. We already had the little log house had been moved here during the Bicentennial, the schoolhouse was here before the museum. ... There was just lots of potential of things to do, and there was pretty much lots of willingness to do them, so that was important.

Over time, how has your own personal understanding of the history of the area changed.

Well, just from working on so many projects and working on the narratives of the proposals and things that got submitted for them, I had a step-by-step education. I think of developing content and the research that we would do in order to do that … as building a body of work. … For me, I think of history as a continuum. Those people in the past, they did different things than we did some of the time, they felt different ways, they had different backgrounds some of the time, and in other ways they had very similar desires and wants and needs, and for me that is not a separated-off part, but rather that’s the continuum of history, comes forward to now and informs who we are today. So even when we’re reacting against something from the past, you’re still related. If you get divorced from your history and don’t know that background, if you get divorced from your culture and don’t know that background, then you’re losing an opportunity to better understand how people got to where they are now. … Culture is not like a separate thing that happens over here. It’s integrated into all things. We all have culture; it doesn’t have to be good culture, that’s not what we’re saying. It’s part of how you live your life, it is your life, and organizations, institutions, like the museum and other cultural institutions, they can contribute a lot to how involved you feel, how much you can be a part of truly the good life of your place, your community.

Speaking broadly, what are the misperceptions people have about museums and their role in a community?

“Dusty tables,” that’s a misperception of history museums – not of all history museums, of course there are some that are the dusty tables. “Segregated from the life of the community” – (but) most contemporary museums can’t afford to be segregated from the life of the community, and there’s so many community-based museums. “Hands-off.” “For an intellectual elite.” … Museums are started by all different groups of people. Sure, some of them might be what we would call an intellectual elite, but that’s not all of them by any means, and it certainly wouldn’t be a good description of this museum.

In your tenure as museum director, how have you tried to fight these misperceptions?

We do a lot, first of all, by building variety into the museum. The museum doesn’t stay the same all the time. We also try to keep a high standard of quality. That helps us lots of different ways and is certainly an asset for the community. But we try to organize it in such a way that even though sometimes some things you build at a high production level and for that reason you need it to last quite a while, there are other things you do that happen on a single day or an exhibit space that changes every year, or a case that changes every summer, or every month for that matter. Different ways for people to be involved in the museum.

In your years here you’ve probably gotten to know a lot about some of the major and maybe not-so-major historical figures of the region. Are there any who particularly fascinate you?

Yes. There was a project where I was involved in a lot of the more detailed planning or research, where sometimes I would have sort of visions: (Lumber baron) Orrin Ingram and I were walking down Water Street, and I said to Orrin, “What do you think? Do you think we can do this new dock thing here? I think that would be good for you.” I mean, it gets to be like that and you start writing your history in present tense – where you’re having trouble standing back a little bit from that time. There are certainly people from the lumbering era where you just see the risks that they took, and it didn’t matter so much who they were. There were people who were going to get rich and there were people who would never make a nickel. ... Ellen Welsh, her father I think he was the fire chief, she was the great beauty of the time, kind of the late Teens, early ’20s. If you’ve ever seen the posters and so forth that say “Eau Claire is There,” she’s the spokesmodel. But she herself is a fantastic photographer. She has an amazing eye, and we have reproductions of many of her photographs, and she can tell a story through her pictures. I would really wish that I could talk with her, sit with some of her pictures, and have her talk about them.

Many of us, even those who consider ourselves well-educated, are ignorant of large swathes of history. How does an institution like this combat that?

I think that was one area where we were able to gather a lot of things and present (history) in a different way and even present it at … key times when people are like, “What is this boat landing thing, where did that come from?” (Editor’s note: McLeod is referring to protests over Native American spearfishing in the 1980s.) I even got to ask a few people, “Where do you think this all started from?” They would tell you all kinds of things, and they don’t know how it connects back into the past, and sometimes we can do something about that. Are there swathes of history? Absolutely. … There are some absolutely amazing and fabulous teachers … but of course they still can’t take on everything, and so naturally there would be things that you maybe hadn’t heard about.

Looking back on this 30 years, do you think the community has done enough to preserve its history.

Well, of course, big chunks of it are gone, so could you have saved all of them, and do you try to save everything? Well, you can’t save all of them and you can’t even really try very well. Life continues to evolve. … I think when you have institutions that are dedicated to doing the best they can, you have a better shot at (preserving history).

As you step away here, what do you hope your legacy is?

I hope that it is the involvement in the community, the willingness to be part of the growth and development of the community. I hope it is the commitment to quality, the commitment to really trying to make the most of the story and involve people in the collecting and telling of the story – whether it’s their own or somebody else’s – in many different ways. We do a lot of programming for children. I hope it’s that commitment to making history something for all different ages. I hope it’s our commitment to standards, the arduous process that we went through in order to become an accredited museum. There are not that many of them, it’s unusual. There’s 17 in Wisconsin, there’s one in the western half of the state – that would be us. And I hope it’s that kind of commitment, I hope it’s the willingness to try some things that you haven’t done. Of course, they won’t all work, they won’t all turn out great, but if you don’t keep trying to do things like that, you kind of ossify after a while. I hope it’s things like that.

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McLeod and Bunke enjoy one of the museum's exhibits.

Learning by Listening: new museum director getting up to speed on Valley history

Even before relocating to Wisconsin in December, new Chippewa Valley Museum Director Julie Bunke had been living the museum lifestyle – literally. Her husband, Kirk, was manager of a working farm museum in St. Charles, Ill., and the couple and their two sons lived on the site. That meant that, after a day at her own job directing a museum, Bunke would return home to a 1930s-era farm to do chores and even – in one memorable instance – to assist in the breech birth of a piglet.

Now that the family has settled in the Chippewa Valley, Bunke will no longer be living in a museum, but she’ll still be running one. In early January, she took over the top job at the Chippewa Valley Museum from retiring director Susan McLeod.

“It’s all about advocating for the history,” Bunke said of her new role overseeing the museum in Eau Claire’s Carson Park, which features 12,000 square feet of exhibit space, more than 16,000 artifacts, and countless stories.

“I really do love talking with people who come to visit and any stories they have to share about growing up in the area,” she added. “That’s always been my favorite part working in museums, I think, are the oral histories. Listening to what people remember and what they share and watching their faces light up when they’re telling you about where they played as a kid and what they did.”

The Chippewa Valley Museum is a bigger institution with a larger, more regional scope than Bunke’s previous museums, the St. Charles Heritage Center and the Downers Grove Park District Museum, both in suburban Chicago. However, she believes her 18 years of professional experience will serve her well here. In particular, she notes, both previous jobs involved managing multiple historic buildings, and the Chippewa Valley Museum encompasses not only the museum itself but also two adjacent historic structures (a log home and schoolhouse) and the 1871 Schlegelmilch House on Farwell Street.

A native of Michigan, Bunke earned a master’s degree in historic preservation/museum studies from Eastern Michigan University. She admits with a laugh that earlier in her career she preferred to work with historic collections because – unlike people – they didn’t talk to her. “Over the years being in various positions I’ve really gotten over that shyness, and I think I’m a very outgoing person now,” she added.

Bunke is still formulating goals for her new position. She would like to push to increase museum membership and advocate for children’s programs, but she acknowledges she’ll be spending the near future learning about the job, the region, and its history. To do that, she says she been taking time to snoop around the museum’s library (a worthwhile pastime for anyone hoping to get a broader view of the Valley’s history) and chatting with volunteers and locals. “Sometimes you learn more by listening than by talking,” she said.