Treasure hunt: Could missing artifacts reside in your building?

Richmond Alumni Magazine is challenging everyone on campus to join a treasure hunt to find museum pieces that were scattered when the University moved to the Westhampton campus in 1914.

According to old letters and newspapers, the missing museum pieces include a robe that belonged to the King of Uganda, a mummy’s severed hand with a ring on one of its fingers and “part of the first Star-Spangled Banner.”

The reference to the “Star-Spangled Banner” is particularly intriguing, says Karl Rhodes, the magazine’s editor. “Are we looking for a fragment of a flag or a piece of a musical score? According to an inventory from the 1970s, we had an American flag with 13 stars in the rare books room, but that flag is gone, too.”

The missing museum pieces once resided on the old, downtown campus of Richmond College, which was bounded by Broad, Franklin, Lombardy and Ryland streets. The college built a museum there in the 1880s, but when the college moved to its current campus, no museum was built, and many of Richmond’s treasures were stored crudely in the basements of North Court and Ryland Hall.

“To make matters worse, the museum’s curator, Charles Ryland, died in 1914,” Rhodes says. “And during World War I, the University had to move back to the old campus so the government could use the new campus as a military hospital.”

Some artifacts from the old museum—most notably the mummy and coffin of Thi-Ameny-Net—resurfaced in a natural history museum on the second floor of Maryland Hall, which opened in 1933. Other treasures made their way to the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, which moved from the basement of Puryear Hall to an annex of Boatwright Memorial Library in 1955.

A few years later, students, staff and faculty started finding old museum pieces on campus. They discovered an Egyptian sphinx in a closet in Ryland Hall around 1970, and they found portraits, statues and busts in basements and service tunnels. Some of those relics were thrown out because they were severely damaged. Others were displayed in various places on campus, and some were lost again.

“The centerpiece of the old museum was a full-length, life-size portrait of James Thomas in a gold-leaf, oval frame,” Rhodes says. “I would love to find that painting. According to the 1974 inventory, there was a portrait of James Thomas in Wood Hall, but it doesn’t show up on the University’s current inventory of portraits.”

To join the treasure hunt, visit the online version of the alumni magazine at magazine.richmond.edu.