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From fire grenades to a wreath made from human hair, Batavia museum showcases quirky side of its collection

From Chicago Tribune (https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/12/from-fire-grenades-to-a-wreath-made-from-human-hair-batavia-museum-showcases-quirky-side-of-its-collection/)

During the next few months, visitors to the Batavia Depot Museum will get a chance to see some quirky things they can’t usually see at the facility.

A new exhibit, “Uncovered: Quirks and Curiosities of the Batavia Historical Society,” opened recently at the museum at 155 Houston St. in Batavia. The exhibit, which will run through Nov. 23, contains a trove of artifacts that go well beyond old documents, pictures and knickknacks.

“The idea was that we have some very interesting things in the collection that haven’t been on display in a while and so we wanted to put them out there and talk about them,” Batavia Depot Museum Curator Jessica Meis said.

“As far as the planning of this goes, we generally start making plans for an exhibit about a year before we actually roll it out,” Meis said. “It took about a year from concept to installation and we developed all the panels and information in the past six months.”

Meis said items on display include old “fire grenades” filled with a saltwater liquid that could be tossed in a fire to put out house flames, vintage toys and other items that go beyond the norm.

“We have a 19th century spyglass from before 1839 that came to Batavia through an early merchant ship captain,” she said.

The list of items also includes a wreath made with hair from 1862 – a craft that was done, Meis said, “to either mourn people or track family trees.”

“It’s an intricate, woven piece made with human hair,” she said. “This piece, in particular, included several different family members and we were able to track down who they were.”

Other items on display include “possibly a piece from the merry-go-round that was in Glenwood Park in the early 1900s,” Meis said. “It’s kind of a fiberglass horse head thing that was found in the Fox River around where Glenwood Park was. We also have a mannequin that was painted by a local artist as a very unique canvas and some very interesting medical implements.”

One of those implements is a Renulife Electric Therapy case – a medical device from the 1940s-1950s that “was found not to do what it said by the FDA,” she said.

“It’s kind of a cute thing advertised as a ‘cure all’ that emitted violet light rays to cure different symptoms,” Meis said.

The items on display, Meis said, belong to the Batavia Historical Society collection that remains in the care of the Depot Museum staff.

“We knew that (the artifacts) were there, but we did an inventory process last summer with some interns and they were able to track and list out all these things that we haven’t been able to find in our digital database,” Meis said.

She said some of the items definitely “got our staff’s attention.”

During the formal opening of the exhibit on Aug. 8, Meis said that “people were really excited to see different things.”

“They hadn’t been on view before, at least in the memory of the museum staff, so there were interesting things we could uncover for the public,” she said. “People were very interested in the different history of the things and we tried to give a lot of context as to why these things were here or what they were used for.

“People were very interested in the hair wreath,” she said. “That’s a very interesting part of history. People don’t often see human hair in a museum space and it was a really fun conversation starter.”

Meis said that “there’s something to a lot of these things becoming more interesting with time. So maybe back in the 1860s, the hair wreath was something commonplace but thankfully someone seized it so we get to talk about it today,” she said. “The fire grenades we have on display, those were definitely a consumable thing so the fact that we have some intact today is very interesting to talk about.

“A lot of these pieces end up showing how far Batavia’s reach was from across the country and across the world,” she added. “The spyglass, we know, was from a captain who traveled all the way to the East Indies and so just knowing that it came back to Batavia and we’re now preserving it for future generations is really cool.”

Admission is free to the museum. For hours of operation and more information about the Batavia Depot Museum, call 630-406-5274 or go to www.bataviahistoricalsociety.org/