West of down­town St. Louis sits an 1851 town­house that bears no obvi­ous rela­tion­ship to the mon­u­men­tal archi­tec­ture, trendy con­do­mini­ums, and sports sta­di­ums of its sur­round­ings. Orig­i­nal­ly the res­i­dence of a fur-trade tycoon and now the Camp­bell House Muse­um, the house has been sub­ject to ener­getic preser­va­tion and her­itage work for some 130 years.

In Tak­ing Pos­ses­sion: The Pol­i­tics of Mem­o­ry in a St. Louis Town House, Hei­di Aron­son Kolk, assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visu­al Arts, explores the com­plex and some­times con­tra­dic­to­ry moti­va­tions for safe­guard­ing the house as a site of pub­lic mem­o­ry. Craft­ing nar­ra­tives about the past that com­fort­ed busi­ness elites and white mid­dle-class patrons, muse­um pro­mot­ers assuaged con­cerns about the city’s most press­ing prob­lems, includ­ing racial and eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty, seg­re­ga­tion and pri­va­ti­za­tion, and the lega­cies of vio­lence for which St. Louis has been known since Ferguson.