New Grant to Preserve the History of Tyson Research Center

Environmental scientists, humanities scholars, and staff from Tyson Research Center, the Center for the Humanities, and WashU Libraries Special Collections received an Ignite Interdisciplinary Grant for their collaborative project, “Beyond the Bunkers: Excavating the Twentieth Century at Tyson Research Center.” The project employs a public humanities lens to develop a more coherent and comprehensive history of the Tyson Research Center.

The $50,000 seed grant-funded project involves principal investigators Stephanie Kirk, director of the Center for the Humanities; Susan Flowers, staff scientist at the Tyson Research Center; and Heidi Kolk, assistant professor in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and other collaborators, including Kelly Schmidt, a reparative public historian at WashU Libraries. Schmidt will play a central role in interpreting and documenting Tyson’s complex history through archival materials.

Tyson is WashU’s 2000-acre environmental field station for environmental research and education. The history of the Tyson site spans thousands of years. Before WashU purchased the property in 1963, the land that became Tyson Research Center had been utilized in numerous ways by its residents. Native Americans excavated the land for chert quarrying, and in later periods, Europeans extracted limestone in the region. During WWII and the Korean War, the US military constructed bunkers and other facilities to store and test weapons. “Unearthing Tyson’s uses as a military site offers insights into how larger, global geopolitics played out on local fronts, and illuminates the ongoing connections between the U.S. military, scientific research, and higher education,” write the lead investigators of the project.

The project brings together archivists, historians, and scientists to address “tensions between environmental degradation and archival preservation.” The seed grant will support the preservation and cataloging of a wealth of archival material—correspondence, maps, survey data, and newspapers. For the past two years, Tyson and WashU Libraries Special Collections staff have been transferring fragile archival material from Tyson to the University Archives for processing and storage. Preservation and special collections staff at the Libraries will repair damaged artifacts and objects, index the materials, and store them safely in archival-grade containers for use in research and exhibitions.

According to the project research team, the bulk of the archives constitutes 10 to 15 linear feet of material and large-format maps. An example from this vast archive is the trove of zoological, geological, and plant specimens collected by former center director Richard Coles, which will be preserved and cataloged by Libraries staff.

Kelly Schmidt will guide research on past inhabitants of Tyson’s land, including its histories of indigenous land use, colonizer settlement, and enslavement, to produce a fuller account, which will include maps, oral histories, and other records of descendants of people and communities associated with the land. Schmidt will also connect the project team with other experts and stakeholders in the greater St. Louis region to weigh in on those histories and those of Tyson in the twentieth century.

The Ignite Interdisciplinary Grant program is designed to catalyze interdisciplinary research projects that are aligned with the Here and Next priority areas. Learn more.

Center for the Humanities staff have led recent efforts to secure external funding for projects that explore the complex histories of the land on which the Tyson Research Center is situated. Under Kirk’s guidance, Meredith Kelling and Laura Perry at the Center for the Humanities will continue to develop new opportunities for humanities faculty and students to engage with Tyson Research Center, including an undergraduate fellowship led by Kelling that works directly with Tyson archives.

This story originally appeared on WashU Libraries.