The Ethel Walker Middle School Museum of Curiosities

“Curiouser and Curiouser!”
The Ethel Walker Middle School Museum of Curiosities, Simsbury/Virtual
November 2024

Connecticut museum visit #538, a somewhat difficult one for me to write about. It’s not because it’s an entirely online museum, it’s because it involves 6th and 7th grade girls with names and faces attached. I have zero wish to feature or exploit these young women, so I’ve removed last names and covered faces.

And more on the above, of course I don’t blur faces of every random person on this website, but in this case, it attaches name, face, place, and age. A bit much for me.

Even if my son was friends with at least one of them. Which is also weird.

After fifth grade, some kids at my son’s elementary school went to a choice middle school and some went off to private schools. At least one, as I learned today, went to Ethel Walker Middle School in Simsbury.

(She appears elsewhere on this website, which is also weird because it’s not like she and my son were tight or anything.)

Anyway, this page is about The Ethel Walker Middle School Museum of Curiosities which is awesome. There’s no way for me to ever know how many other schools in Connecticut have these virtual museums, but I somehow found this one because the big girl Ethel Walker School has a real history museum on campus that is kept virtual for the likes of you and me.

In searching for that, I came upon this. And I really like this. Also, this, like that, has a physical presence at the school as well – it is located in the Middle School lobby and consists of two wooden library card catalog cabinets with a total of 60 drawers. I, of course, accessed it online.

And I hope this continues. I see there’s a 2022-23 version and a 2023-24 version, but none more recent as I write this in early 2025. It was created by Kim Thacker, the same person largely responsible for the The Ethel Walker School Interactive Museum.

The first version of the Museum of Curiosities was created after the sixth graders went on a “mudlarking” trip to the nearby Farmington River. It consists (consisted?) of found objects. Read: litter.

Mudlarking is essentially “fast archaeology” – no excavating is required. The students waded up and down the river gathering bits of china dishes, glass bottles, and other items of refuse of a type that always seem to make their way to waterways. Zia S. ’29 found an early-19th century clay pipe stem and Mariah C. ’29 found a complete aqua glass bottle made in Waterbury, the same of which is also on display in the Mattatuck Museum. She was delighted to discover that “real” museums have objects exactly like the things she and her classmates found.

After the mudlarking trip, students cleaned their objects with soap, water, and toothbrushes.

The students then researched their found objects and through that exercise, hopefully learned a little about research and a lot about bad research. After that, they toured the Wadsworth Atheneum’s virtual Cabinet of Curiosities display to see what museum labels and museum displays look like. They created labels for their items and made “beds” for their objects in two vintage card catalog cabinets that the school no longer was using.

In the article, one student exclaimed, “We learned how to gather information about our objects and put together a great museum.” I’ll be the judge of that, young lady.

Just kidding, it is a great museum. A super cool class activity and the technology employed is fairly smooth.

Most items have multiple pictures and an audio track recorded by the students. There is an inordinate amount of glass bottles and shards in the collection. That seems like quite a dangerous mudlark if the majority of what they found could have cut them pretty badly.

A few items seemed… I don’t know… rather convenient. Like, how did they find so many Connecticut made antique bottles and tools and stuff in a very visible creek near a popular part of the Farmington River? I’m not saying they didn’t, but these are some very good little budding archaeologists.

The first year of the museum was such a hit, then went and did it again.

But for the second year, which involved many of the same young women, there was no more mudlarking. This would be more true to the Victorian-era trend of “cabinets of curiosity.” The whole thing here teaches the students the four classic categories: naturalia (objects that occur in nature), scientifica (human-made/modified tools), exotica (rare or foreign objects that occur in nature), or artificialia (human-made works of art/craft).

Instead of river finds, the student selected from a bunch of objects provided by ol’ Ms. Thacker again. They again had to research the items, cite that research, photograph, and write (and speak) blurbs about them.

(This wasn’t the plan though, as the only reason the kids didn’t mudlark is because of historic rains that rendered that activity impossible. Personally, from the outside looking in, I like that the kids got some more variety.)

I expect this museum to continue into the future, adding new items and objects, swapping out things as the students matriculate. Ms. Thacker has grand ideas involving the high school ages and foreign languages and theater students… on and on. As the state’s resident museum guy, I give this project and its execution a solid thumbs up. As these privileged young women graduate and attend Smith and Wellesley and become my son’s boss someday, I hope they look back fondly at their time as Museum of Curiosities creators and curators.

The Ethel Walker Middle School Museum of Curiosities
CTMQ’s Museum Visits