Warmest of holiday season greetings, everyone! All of us at the Museum and Rowan Oak want to express our sincere thanks for everyone’s continuing Membership support, program viewing, and online events and activities participation. In this challenging year that has required so many adaptations by all of us, across realms of personal, family, and professional life, it has been abundantly clear that the University’s two museum properties continue to benefit from what I like to describe as an ecosystem of stakeholder goodwill and thoughtfulness.
Our supporters not only sustain us, they inspire us. Thank you a thousand-fold for these gestures large and small, they are always noticed and greatly appreciated by the professional staff and I.
I want to dedicate the greater portion of this months’ 5th & University director’s message to the fortunes of William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak—the only National Historic Landmark historic house museum owned and operated for academic and public educational benefit by any of the major Southeast state universities. While the house interiors are temporarily closed in this public health context, we are seeing very large numbers of daily visitors to the Rowan Oak landscape, grounds, and Bailey Woods Trail.
We’ve added two new A-frame ground based signs at the site to hold two primary pieces of interpretive print collateral as walk-up visitor takeaways—the newly re-designed Rowan Oak House & Grounds Tour booklet, and the Bailey Woods Trail pamphlet. The signs also remind visitors of the 7-day-a-week, dawn to dusk free access to Rowan Oak’s grounds that we have been proud to sustain throughout the current period.
I’d also like to share an overview of four major developments for Rowan Oak over the past 18-month period. More than $500,000 in private donor support was raised in mid-2019 for the acquisition of all contents of the house—furnishings, books, artwork, and exhibit artifacts—securing them now as held-in-perpetuity collections deployed for continuing educational impact for the public, scholars far and wide, and the University’s academic community. This gift of Sandy and John Black of Madison, MS. has been nothing short of transformative, and we are profoundly grateful to them. Additionally, we can announce the acquisition of the web domain name rowanoak.com from a private owner, and the development over recent months of an entirely new and upgraded Rowan Oak website deploying that URL—a very significant interpretive and virtual-access upgrade for the site.
Rowan Oak curator Bill Griffith and I are very pleased to share word of the designation of Rowan Oak as Best Historic Site in the state by Mississippi Magazine in its “Best of Mississippi List, 2020”. And we are exceptionally excited to have the creation of a new University-classified professional staff role of Assistant Curator—a first-ever such position in the University’s 48-year ownership of the site—notably augmenting Rowan Oak staffing capacity upon its Posting/Search/Hire process, which we anticipate in the 2nd Quarter of 2021.
Please continue to follow us on our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter platforms, and our two websites, here at museum.olemiss.edu and rowanoak.com. As always, you may reach any of the professional staff by phone from our front-desk extension 662-915-7073, and I’m fully available to you at all times at rsaarnio@olemiss.edu and 662-915-7202. I will always be pleased to have anyone’s thoughts, suggestions, and questions, or to speak to any concerns.
With sincere regards from the entire team, and with every best wish to you and your families for a safe, healthy, and wonderful holiday season ahead.
We’ll see you in the New Year!
Sincerely,
Robert Saarnio
Museum Director