Tontitown plans museum revamp

TONTITOWN - Since 1986, a small house has served as the museum for one of Arkansas’ few Italian towns.

The Tontitown Historical Museum contains a wine-bottling machine, the crowns of Grape Festival queens and a confessional chair from St. Joseph’s Catholic Church.

Through artifacts and photographs, the museum documents the history of Tontitown, which was settled by about 40 families that came from Italy by way of the cotton fields of east Arkansas.

Since its inception, the museum has served Tontitown’s residents and descendants, like a communalancestor’s house where artifacts from an earlier time are stored so they’re not lost and history is not forgotten.

But some think the museum could have a broader appeal.

Heather Ranalli Peachee, president of the museum board, said cars pass by on Henri de Tonti Boulevard, also known as U.S. 412, carrying people to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.

If motorists notice the little museum in Tontitown and stop, there’s a good chance the museum will be closed. It’s only open six hours a week, on Saturday and Sunday from 1 - 4 p.m., and that’s only from June through October.

The museum needs to hire a part-time worker so it can be open more often, Peachee said. That could cost $15,000 a year.

The Tontitown museum, which is funded primarily by the city, has an annual budget of $3,000. That money is used to produce and promote books about the community, such as “So Big, This Little Place”: The Founding of Tontitown, Arkansas, 1898-1917 by Susan Young.

Admission to the museum is free, but they accept donations.

Peachee said the museum board has been working with Allyn Lord, director of Shiloh Museum of Ozark History inSpringdale, to develop a fiveyear strategic plan.

“Early on, they looked within and said ‘Lets preserve our history,’” Lord said. “Then, as the years have gone by, they’re now starting to look outward and say ‘Who else wants to hear our story?’ Their Italian heritage and the story of how this town was founded and thrived is really a unique story.”

The story of the Italian immigrants is relevant now because of the immigration of Hispanics and Marshallese to Springdale, just east of Tontitown, Lord said.

Many residents didn’t initially welcome the Italian immigrants, Lord said, “but overthe course of time, as people showed their common traits of hard work, faith and upholding their culture and tradition, people in the area saw that they were not so unlike them.”

A strategic-plan committee will report to the museum board shortly after the 115th annual Tontitown Grape Festival, which is scheduled for Aug. 6-10, Peachee said. The request will likely go before the Tontitown City Council in September.

Michael Hartman, a museum board member, said the group is trying to decide if the museum should be expanded or perhaps moved to another building. If it’s moved, the 1910 building where the museum is now located could serve as a homestead exhibit. There isn’t room in the museum now for all the items in the collection, so some are stored at Shiloh Museum, he said.

The Tontitown museum also doesn’t have the climate-controlled environment necessary to preserve fragile material, Peachee said.

The museum is housed in the former home of two of town’s original settlers, sisters Mary and Zelinda Bastianelli. The sisters left the house to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. The city bought the building from the church to operate as a museum, Hartman said. Charlotte Piazza has been the museum’s curator since its inception.

“We are really a uniquestory,” Hartman said. “We are rural Italians, which you never hear about. … They were all farmers.”

From the 1870s until 1920, 4 million Italians immigrated to the United States, according to Young’s book. Most of them settled in crowded cities on the East Coast.

New York banker and industrialist Austin Corbin and a few friends bought several thousand acres of land in Arkansas’ Chicot County and began recruiting Italian families to move there to work the land. Corbin called his Arkansas endeavor Sunnyside Plantation.

But the immigrants to Sunnyside didn’t fare well in theflat, swampy Delta. Malaria killed many of them, and the survivors abandoned Sunnyside after a few years.

“Pretty much everybody from north Italy came up here,” Peachee said of Tontitown.

Father Pietro Bandini, an Italian priest working on behalf of Italian immigrants in New York City, was assigned as chaplain to Sunnyside.

In 1898, he led about 40 families from Sunnyside to Tontitown. Bandini and an exploratory party from Sunnyside had visited Tontitown late in 1897 and determined the climate and terrain better suited for the type of smallscale agriculture to whichthey were accustomed.

As the leader of the Tontitown settlement, Bandini is a subject of much of the material in the museum, including his wooden cane, vestments that were presented to him when he visited Rome in 1911 and a bust sculpted by Toni Maestri Wirts. Bandini died of a stroke in 1917 and is buried in Tontitown.

As time passes and Springdale sprawls farther to the west, toward Tontitown, the hard work of Italian immigrants to found the community of Tontitown may recede from the collective memory. But a growing, vibrant museum can keep that history alive, Peachee said.