Closed City Museums Will Sell Off Some Artifacts

For nearly 40 years, Lancaster city's Heritage Center Museum, and in more recent years its companion Quilt & Textile Museum, have served as an attic for Lancaster County.
More than 3,700 items have been donated to those museums. The core of the collections represent the finest of the county's Colonial and Federal-era decorative arts.
But some of the items don't.
On Monday, museum officials announced they would be selling or giving away items that are of poor quality, are in poor condition, are redundant to the collection or have little or no connection to Lancaster County.
Wendell Zercher, the museum curator, cited a cooper teapot made in Philadelphia.
"It's great, but it's not Lancaster County," Zercher said.
The items will be culled from the collection - "deaccessioned," in museum terms - as Zercher and museum trustees go through the collections and prepare them for storage.
Both museums closed nearly a month ago after museum board members announced the organization could no longer afford to operate. The Heritage Center, on the northwest corner of Penn Square, reverted to city ownership. The Quilt Museum, nearby at 37 N. Market St., has been put up for sale. It will be opened only for special events this year.
Philip Zimmerman, a collection consultant, emphasized that the coming auction is not a liquidation of the collection, nor is it intended to fund a museum endowment. Rather, items are being deaccessioned to spare the cost of storing them, he said.
"The intent here is housekeeping," Zimmerman said.
Speaking to about 35 museum members and supporters, Zimmerman stressed the effort is being made because the museum board intends to keep the core collections intact and display them again in the future.
Where and when that will be, however, remains unclear.
Gavin Harding, a former banker and the museum board treasurer, laid out the financial situation. Last year, the operating costs of the museum were $107,000 more than revenue. The museums still have $145,000 in reserves, but at the rate of spending, the museums could have operated only another 14 months.
With the decision to close and return the Heritage Center to the city, some maintenance funds were redirected to pay museum debt. But $725,000 still is owed for renovation to the quilt museum building.
The building has been assessed at $1.6 million. If the building is sold, the debt could be erased and funds provided to maintain the collection, Harding said.
To reopen the museum in a rented space would require proceeds from an endowment of about $4 million, Wendy Nagle, the museum executive director, has said.
The Lancaster County Community Foundation only recently established an endowment on behalf of the museums, and some money has been donated, Nagle said.
In response to an audience question, Nagle said a $2 million investment fund once held by the board had been spent over the last decade.
Zercher said 150 to 200 items in the collection already had been given away to other organizations, such as historical societies within the county that had closer ties to the objects.
Another 200 items, such as individual pewter spoons and embroidered towels, could go to auction.
Zimmerman said those items may bring less than $10,000.
Proceeds from the sales would go to a restricted account to be used for care of the remaining collection and for acquisition of additional items to complement the collection, Nagle said.
Zimmerman, who has previously worked at the Winterthur Museum and at New York Historical Society's museum, called Lancaster's collection "first class."
"The Heritage Center collection is not a large collection, but it is a very, very rich and diverse collection," he said.
That collection is expected to be moved into secure storage by April.