Incredible journey
By BILL BRAKSICK
SYCAMORE – The Journey Stories exhibit on display at the Sycamore History Museum is nothing if not ambitious. The traveling Smithsonian exhibit seeks to do no less than tell the story of how the United States came together.
“It’s the story of who we are,” Jayne Higgins said.
Higgins, an English instructor at Rockford College, helps people negotiate their way through the exhibit.
While the panels of the exhibit are not so large, the scope of the story they tell is enormous.
The exhibit is in three sections, beginning with America’s colonization.
“If you got on the Mayflower, you weren’t going home,” Higgins said. “These were one-way trips.”
The second section depicts an era of great expansion, between 1850 and 1950, when major cross-country migrations took place.
The third section focuses on the modern world, and our ability to move easily over great distances.
But while the exhibit celebrates America’s journey, it does not whitewash its flaws. While the Mayflower’s arrival led to Plymouth Colony, it led just as directly to the Trail of Tears, an important historical journey in which Native Americans were forcibly moved.
Also noted in the early part of the exhibit are the African slave ships that surely are among the worst journeys taken by our country’s ancestors.
“They wanted to tell the whole story,” she said, “not just the pretty stories.”
Even during the phase where travelers pushed the boundaries of expansion, the stories of progress are counterbalanced with those of great struggle.
“We expanded too fast,” Higgins explained. “We plowed too much, didn’t know anything about soil conservation, and we ended up in a dust bowl.”
Next to that panel, which explores the rural journeys of agriculture, is a section that will not be leaving when the Smithsonian exhibit moves on after July 11.
“We’ve tried to parallel those stories with our own stories,” Higgins said.
Perhaps the most remarkable journey Higgins tells is one barely a month old, the tale of a group of people moving into a new location while also hosting a traveling Smithsonian exhibit making its national debut.
On the Tuesday before opening weekend they had a building, but there was no landscaping, no sidewalks and the exhibit had not even arrived yet.
“I don’t know many towns of this size that would have pulled together quite like this,” Higgins said.
“The whole thing has been a remarkable journey of our own. This is really a Sycamore story.”
