COLUMN: South Dargan Street shaping up culturally with museum site

On Feb. 3, 1939, Dr. Ralph Van Deaman Magoffin, head of the department of classics at New York University turned the key to a ground floor door at the Florence Public Library and opened the new Florence Museum.
A Morning News article the next morning said Magoffin led visitors into “what is expected to become a great museum.”
The museum started in the library basement, a spot important in the cultural history of Florence. Besides being part of the library, that basement served as a sort of delivery room for other important institutions.
About 15 or20 years after the museum started there, it also was where the University of South Carolina at Florence started as a two-year center of the state university. USCF evolved into Francis Marion University.
(Besides all of its time as the library, the museum and FMU grew out of that building. Those facts make it special in Florence history. Whatever happens to the old library, in private or public hands, it should be preserved and its role remembered.)
In his remarks, Magoffin said the new museum was “due and just tribute to Miss Jane B. Evans through whose unfailing interest and persistent effort the museum has become a reality.” The newspaper article said that Magoffin three years earlier had made an address that launched the effort to create the museum “of which Miss Evans had long dreamed.”
The opening was a big deal. Marion D. Lucas, president of the Florence Museum, presided, and Dr. H. Tucker Graham, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church gave an invocation.
Lucas said Miss Evans was the “prime mover and persistent worker in the undertaking.” She had been injured in an accident before the opening, but was present for the ceremony.
It must have been quite a day. Also here for the opening was Dr. David Moore Robinson, professor of classics at Johns Hopkins University. He spoke on art discoveries in Greece, illustrated by slides. Morning News editor Mason C. Brunson introduced Robinson.
The library used to have an auditorium on the third floor where public meetings were held and many children suffered through recitals. The day of the museum opening, there was a heavy rain, but the paper said that the auditorium was “well-filled.“
The Morning News said editorially that the first day visitors looked “in rapt wonder upon the first unit now occupying one large room.” There was to be more, and the newspaper thought that the school board and library board should make the entire basement floor available for museum displays.
Jane Beverly Evans was one of those active citizens who do things to make a community better. She was born in 1866, daughter of a prominent Florence physician who had been important in the development of the city and county.
She was one of the first public school teachers in the community, and at the time of World War 1, she was a leader of a group of women who established the Blue Bird Tea Room. That was located on what might have been the last vacant lot on the 100 block of West Evans Street.
The place served as a stopping place for servicemen who came through town during the war. A department store, long ago closed, later occupied a building on the site.
Miss Evans also served on the library board when the old public library was put up at the corner of Irby and Pine streets. The library has since moved out, and the building probably is wondering what is going to happen to it.
In the1930s, she arranged to use the money still in the Blue Bird Tea Room account to buy some exhibits from an established museum, and those became the nucleus for opening the Florence Museum in 1939.
My mother once took me to visit the museum at the library, and Miss Evans was there that day and explained some of the exhibits.
Miss Evans died in 1950, shortly before the museum moved to its present site beside Timrod Park. Things are in motion now to give it a fine new home on South Dargan Street with other cultural attractions. If that pans out, South Dargan will have the library, Little Theatre and FMU performing arts center in addition to the museum.

— Thom Anderson is a retired journalist who has 40 years experience with South Carolina newspapers, including the Morning News. He can be reached at .