By Sam Elliott
There wouldn’t be a Conner Prairie museum park today without the William Conner of the 1800s — the fur trader who first came to Central Indiana in 1800 and went on to play a pivotal role in the founding of Hamilton Co.
His home, built in 1823, is believed to be one of the first brick buildings built in Central Indiana — and now visitors to Conner Prairie can experience it in a whole new way.
As an official Indiana Bicentennial Legacy project, the Conner House exhibit has been reimagined to provide guests a more interactive and engaging experience as they learn about the area’s history and the Conners’ family life.
“Conner Prairie continues to open doors to new ways to inspire curiosity and foster learning about Indiana’s past by providing engaging, individualized and unique experiences,” president and CEO Norman Burns told the assembled crowd the night the new Conner House was unveiled March 23. “Obviously a project like this you can’t do without a team of people that really get behind the project, both donors and staff and others involved.”
The involved staff includes Brian Mancuso, Conner Prairie’s director of exhibits.
“This was about a two-year process,” he said. “We really wanted to revamp this house, which is our core. This is why we’re here. We’re here because of the Conner House. Eli Lily bought this to then grow from. We really wanted to kind of revisit it for the bicentennial to add different kinds of experiences, a little bit more modern experiences, and change it from a good domestic story where you’d walk through and say, ‘Oh that’s a lovely chair’ or ‘That’s a lovely couch’ to different topics and a little bit more complex topics — in the guest room, for example, we’re talking about William Conner’s family life, which was very complex and kind of heralded the shift in Indiana at that time. We explored different sets of topics in each room and that’s something we haven’t’ done before.”
Topics throughout the house’s kitchen and ground-level rooms plus upstairs bedrooms can be explored through a collection of new interactive displays, and missing throughout the home are mainstays of many other museums — “do not touch” signs.
“I like that we’ve peppered objects throughout so they’re touchable,” Mancuso said. “Conner Prairie is all about touch, all about interacting with things. In the Conner House, we decided to add in a little bit of media to bring people in, too.”
“Everything in the house, if it’s not under glass, it’s a reproduction and you can touch it and pick it up and we’re happy about that,” added Kim McCann, Conner Prairie’s assistant manager of interpretation. “I think there’s a lot of discussion in the museum world right now about the death of the historic home. Many historic homes across the world are closing because people have lost interest and they kind of find it stuffy and boring. So what we’ve done is we’ve changed the Conner House in a way we hope excites people … I think it allows us to tell more of the story, more layers of the William Conner story, than we were able to tell before.”
Brick by brick
The way the Conner House sits on the Conner Prairie property means guests’ first view of the building is actually of the rear of the house. The true front of the home was positioned facing down a large hill leading to the White River, which would bring travelers to the area in the 1800s.
So William Conner designed his home to look more appealing — and give more of an appearance of wealth — from that side.
“On the front of the Conner House, the way the bricks are laid out is called a Flemish bond. Every other layer of brick is the side of a brick and then the end of a brick — that means it takes a lot of bricks,” Kim McCann, Conner Prairie’s assistant manager of interpretation, said. “The walls are four bricks thick on the exterior, too. It’s a lot of bricks … On the back of the house, the bricks are laid in the common bond. It’s a non-fancy layout for bricks that takes far fewer bricks, and therefore costs far less.
“So William Conner was very calculating and made a choice to put a very fancy bond, which puts forth the idea that he had a lot of money, on the front of this house,” she added. “The back of the house was where workers would enter, or someone not as important as a traveler or dignitary.”
