Marian Wilson Kimber is Professor of Musicology at the University of Iowa and the editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music.

On October 6, prison laborers began the process of dismantling the 168-year-old State Historical Society of Iowa in Iowa City. State administrators claim it is too expensive to run. You wouldn’t think a music historian like me would have much to look at in the Society’s collection. Spillville was famously visited by Czech composer Antonín Dvořák in 1893. Iowa was the birthplace of Meredith Willson, Bix Beiderbecke, and Simon Estes and the site of the Surf Ballroom, but otherwise, it doesn’t have much of a musical reputation.

I first visited the modest brick building in 2011, searching for the women who posed like the “Grecian urn” ladies satirized in Willson’s The Music Man—yes, they were real. The collection had photographs. But it was something else I encountered there that transformed my research. Archivist Mary Bennett brought me a cardboard box of little program booklets from women’s clubs all over Iowa.

I was particularly struck by the pale green flier of the Philharmonic Society, a women’s music club in Tama, that listed its ambitious programming for 1926–1927: 81 pieces by twelve composers, all of whom were from or were associated with Iowa. I have lived in this state for decades, but I had never heard of most of the composers on the Society’s programs.

Tama Philharmonic Program, State Historical Society of Iowa:

Locations of state composers events sponsored by women’s organizations, ca. 1901-1966

It took a few years for me to get back to researching that single flier, but when I did it was like a pebble thrown into a lake—the circles around the Tama Philharmonic got bigger and bigger. The Tama Philharmonic wasn’t the only women’s club promoting Iowa composers. Some 185 women’s clubs in around one hundred towns hosted Iowa composers events at their meetings.

A clubwoman from Ames, Perle Schmidt, was the most active figure in the network of women working for Iowa’s musical heritage. Beyond Iowa, other women’s clubs promoted the composers of their states as part of the National Federation of Music Clubs’ goal to make America the musical center of the world.

Schmidt is now featured in my forthcoming book, which shows that clubwomen activists like her had an incredible impact, literally changing the music that was heard across America. I would not know about Iowa’s past musical life—or about the impact of women on American music—if it hadn’t been for seeing one little program held by the SHSI in Iowa City.

I feel the loss the collection deeply. I’ve recently been asked to write a chapter for a book about music in the Midwest. I had been planning to write about Iowa, but without the local materials, I will be contributing a chapter related to Wichita, Kansas, instead.

What has been most horrifying to me is the haste and the unprofessional way in which the closure of the building has been handled. Archivists’ ethics say that any collection going to be shut down must be professionally assessed. There has not been enough time for this to happen. It’s been made clear that there isn’t room for the entire collection in the State Historical Building in Des Moines and that lots of it will be discarded. There have been protests and a petition with almost eight-thousand signatures, to no avail.

Now there’s a lawsuit, filed by a group of people including renowned historian Linda Kerber and retired University of Iowa archivist, David McCartney. But on October 6 I drove by the Society’s modest brick building, surrounded by yellow tape, and saw the moving truck, accompanied by two sheriffs—appropriate for a crime scene, the theft of the history that might have been written using the collection.

As I have lain awake in early morning hours grieving, I have wondered if that box of women’s club programs that changed my life will end up in the dumpster. I’ve thought of the single file folder of little gray envelopes of newspaper clippings about Iowa musicians that Perle Schmidt donated to the SHSI—which influenced my understanding of what she accomplished. No one would look at them and think that they would be significant—after all, newspapers are digitized and on microfilm, so we don’t need to save stray clippings, right? But I wouldn’t understand the work of Schmidt—and by extension that of countless other women described in my book—if those sources hadn’t been preserved and readily available.

It’s painful to realize the people in charge of Iowa’s history apparently have no idea about how history works. If they did, they would know there is no way to predict what parts of the collection will be of interest five, twenty, or one hundred years from now. Hastily deciding what is and isn’t important ignores the nature of doing historical research. One item—like a concert program from Tama—can be the impetus for completely new understandings.

The number crunchers who only think about money may decide that most Iowa citizens won’t need a portion of the SHSI collection and dispose of it. But you never know when a historian will encounter something no one else has looked at, and it will change our knowledge of Iowa and its place in the world. As my own career demonstrates, simply counting the number of people that come through the door every year tells you nothing about the broad and lasting impact of research that can be inspired by just a few visits.

You can sign the petition here.

With gratitude for being able to do the following research, none of which would have been possible without the State Historical Society of Iowa in Iowa City and its staff:

Clubwomen Activists and the Making of American Music (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).

The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press, 2017), winner of the Society for America Music’s H. Earle Johnson Award.

“Making Dvořák Iowan: Perle Schmidt, Spillville, and the Construction of Iowa’s Musical Identity.” Annals of Iowa 83, no. 1 (Winter 2025): 29-54.

“Musical Iowana: Iowa Women’s Clubs and the Promotion of Iowa Composers.” The Annals of Iowa 78, no. 4 (2019): 331–360.

“Iowa’s Nymphs, Naiads, and Graces: Performing Delsarte for the Masses.” Iowa Heritage Illustrated 92, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 58–61.