Welcome to the online version of
Vol. VIII
2001 Season
Newsletter of the Robert G. Ingersoll
Birthplace Museum
and the Robert Green Ingersoll Memorial Committee
The
Robert Green Ingersoll Memorial Committee's biennial conference for 2001
will focus on one of the other famous births (besides Ingersoll's!)
to occur in New York's Finger Lakes region during the early 19th
century. Treasure seeker-turned-prophet Joseph Smith published the
Book of Mormon in Palmyra, New York, in 1830, giving metaphorical birth to
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as
Mormons. Perhaps no church's origins have been subjected to more
thorough historical scrutiny — but despite the debunking of its origin
myths, Mormonism is well on its way to becoming America's first world
religion.
"Mormon Origins in Ingersoll Land" will be held Friday through Sunday, July 6-8, 2001, at the Ramada Inn Lakefront in Geneva, New York, 11 miles north of the Museum. Speakers and performers will include Paul Kurtz, feminist historian Sally Roesch Wagner, independent Mormon publisher George D. Smith, RGI committee chair Roger Greeley, Council for Secular Humanism director Ed Buckner, independent Mormon editors Neal and Rebecca Chandler, humanist activist Jan Loeb Eisler, religion scholar Robert M. Price, and many others. Wagner will perform her one-woman show as atheist feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, capping an elegant Friday night banquet at beautiful Anthony Road Vineyards less than a mile from the Museum site.
Saturday morning, attendees will receive a crash course in early Mormon history, then travel by motorcoach to Palmyra, where much of that history took place. We'll tour the lavishly-restored printers' shop where the first edition of the Book of Mormon was produced, and visit Hill Cumorah, where Joseph Smith claimed to have dug up the golden plates from which he supposedly translated the Book of Mormon. Saturday night we'll join a crowd of (literally) thousands for Mormonism's outdoor summer spectacle, the Hill Cumorah Pageant. More than a thousand costumed volunteers re-enact scenes from the Book of Mormon backed by bold music and world-class special effects. (What should we make of the fact that the current Pageant was scripted by a world-renowned science fiction author, Orson Scott Card?)
On Sunday, Paul Kurtz will lead a wide-randing discussion of humanism's future. How can Ingersoll's legacy be preserved and reinterpreted for the 21st century? A Sunday brunch on the hotel's lakeside verandah (weather permitting) will follow.
Ingersoll conference always emphasize American history, freethinking fellowship, and the scenic beauty of New York's Finger Lakes. This so-called "burned-over district," in which Robert G. Ingersoll was born, gave rise to many of the 19th century's most important religious and reform movements.
Please join us this year as we delve deeply into one of the most colorful of them all. Registration is just $149 plus optional meals. You must reserve your sleeping room direct with the Ramada Lakefront Geneva; rooms are available at an attractive conference discount rate of $99.00 per night. A conference registration form can be found here, or you can register by phone at (800) 458-1366.
Debuting in 2001 will be the Ingersoll Museum on the World Wide Web. This “virtual tour” will feature over 100 digital photographs of the Museum and its principal holdings, plus hundreds of pages of interpretation drawn from the Museum’s signage. There will even be a few full-motion video clips!
When the Virtual Tour debuts, there’ll be one place online where Net surfers can go to see and learn about key Museum artifacts, see rare period photos of Ingersoll in action, and even download Thomas Edison recordings of Ingersoll’s voice.
Keep watching www.secularhumanism.org/ingersoll for an announcement when the Virtual Tour will go online.
Two elegant plaques adorn the Wall of Fame in the front hallway of the
Ingersoll Birthplace, listing "Out-standing Supporters" -
contributors who've donated $500 or more for the rehabilitation or support
of the Museum. These major donors are literally our lifeblood, for the
Museum depends almost totally on gifts for the $12,000 to $15,000 it needs
to operate each year. (Gate and gift shop receipts cover just a fraction
of Museum operating costs.)
You can add your name to the Outstanding Supporters plaque by making a gift of $500 or more.
For a gift of $10,000 or more, we'll record your name on a special plaque and recognize you as the Official Sponsor of Museum Operations for the Year 2001. (Should gifts exceed operating expenses in any given year, the surplus is placed into the Museum's endowment fund.) To support the Museum, please send your check payable to Council for Secular Humanism/Ingersoll to P.O. Box 664, Amherst NY 14226. You can make a gift using your MasterCard or Visa by calling toll-free 1-800-458-1366.
The Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum will be open from 12 non to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays from Memorial Day weekend through Hallowe'en (May 26 to October 28, 2001). Admission is only $1.00!
Long-Lost Ingersoll Bust from Michigan To Go On Display in 2001
Long-Lost Ingersoll Bust On Display in 2001 A long-lost
red sandstone bust of Robert Green Ingersoll weighing more than 450 pounds
will go on display in the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum during
the 2001 season. The bust was the center-piece of a large sandstone
"medallion" of Ingersoll, one of numerous medallions of
freethinkers, feminists, and other reformers that decorated the Beckwith
Theater in Dowagiac, Michigan. Built in 1893 as a memorial to
freethinking woodstove baron Philo Beckwith, the theater was far and away
the most lavish in any small Midwestern town. When the theater was razed
in 1966, the Ingersoll medallion fell to the ground and was thought
destroyed. The truth came out last year, thanks to Roger Greeley, chair of
the Ingersoll Memorial Committee and author of The Best of Robert G.
Ingersoll. (That book includes a chapter on the Beckwith Theater.) Following
decades-old leads, Greeley found that the Ingersoll medallion hadn't been
completely destroyed. The bust at its center was almost intact and had
been displayed in a local freethinker's backyard! Greeley arranged for a
stonemason to restore the bust, and it will be placed on display inside
the Museum early in the 2001 season. Greeley and Ingersoll family
descendant Jeff Ingersoll, a principal Museum benefactor, will dedicate
the bust at the Museum on Friday, July 6, 2001, at 5:00 p.m. This ceremony
will kick off the biennial summer Ingersoll conference, "Mormon
Origins in Ingersoll Land" (see related story in this issue).
(click to enlarge)
Before restoration, the Ingersoll bust had a broken nose and other flaws, now repaired.
Little Journeys to the Homes of Great
Americans: Robert Ingersoll, "written by Elbert Hubbard and done into
a Book by the Roycrofters at the Shop, which is in East Aurora, New York,
A.D. 1903." This wonderful little volume, clad in gilt and suede
with ragged-edged, delightfully thick pages bearing astoundingly rich
watermarks, tells a gaily-distorted tale of Ingersoll's birth and life
with the romanticized exaggeration that only turn-of-the-last century
writers could manage with a straight face. Hubbard, patriarch of the Arts
and Crafts movement and a shaper of early 20th-century opinion, built an
empire selling handcrafted furniture and books, many of them volumes of
his own famous wit, from a world-famous crafts colony south of Buffalo,
New York. Among his best-sellers were the Little Journeys books, fanciful
biographies of renowned public figures. For all its floridity, this Little
Journeys book is a heartfelt paean to Ingersoll. A liberal religionist,
Hubbard felt Ingersoll had made an irreversible contribution by rooting
the "unworthy" out of religion. "The earth is a better
place," said Hubbard, "and life and liberty are safer because
Robert G. Ingersoll lived." The Museum has two copies of this volume,
one in leather and one in regular hardcover with a lavishly printed and
embossed dust jacket.
(click to enlarge)
Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Americans: Little
Journey to the Home of Robert Ingersoll
The Museum has two copies of this volume, one
dated 1903 in leather and a 1930 reprint in regular hardcover with
a lavishly printed and embossed dust jacket.
Ingersoll Waterbury
Pocket Watch
(click to enlarge)
The Timex of the 19th century. Huge numbers
of these timepieces were sold at $1.00 each. Robert Green
Ingersoll had no connection with the company that produced these.
"Religions don't have to be true to work, and Mormonism's the proof!" - from Galactic Rapture, a science fiction novel by Museum director Tom Flynn
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