The many-layered cultural lives of things: Experiments in multidisciplinary object study at a Local House Museum in St. Louis

The St. Louis house of famed fur trader-turned-entrepreneur Robert Campbell and his wife Virginia was preserved as a museum, with many of its 1850s furnishings and architectural features and thousands of the family's possessions and papers intact. Preservationists' mythologies of the Robert Campbell House as a remnant of the once-glorious Lucas Place neighborhood and a symbol of the American dream informed 1940s museum practice and continue to shape contemporary perceptions of the house. The house's unusual history and ambiguous status in today's downtown landscape enriched a multidisciplinary model for teaching undergraduate students about objects' complex and at times contradictory lives.