Here is my comparative review of the Denton County Courthouse on the Square Museum’s physical and digital presences as a public history site.
Physical Site Experience
The Denton County Courthouse on the Square Museum’s physical location is, quite literally, centrally located in the middle of Denton’s town square. It resides in the historic courthouse there, which was constructed in 1896. The focus of the physical museum is currently largely dedicated to local businesses of years past. This is because the main exhibit on display at this time, called “Commerce and Community,” is intended to highlight local families who invested their time and expertise into the area. Local families and businesspeople are named in the museum labels. Some of these individuals are alive today, meaning that the museum highlights that historic contributions to local history can be recognized and appreciated while the people who made them are still around.
There were a few other exhibits, including one that charted Texas history through the evolution of firearms. The confederate statue that used to stand outside was also on display, along with an exhibit label that provided facts about slavery in antebellum Texas. The artifacts themselves were most prominently on display- additional context was provided via photographs and the context in which various objects were grouped together.
There was no single flow of traffic. In fact, I was slightly unclear where the museum began and ended since it shared its location with other offices within the courthouse. There were only two other visitors, a mother and her young daughter, while I was there. This was probably partially because I visited at 11 am on a Monday morning. There were many interactive elements to appeal to children throughout the museum. Kids were invited to play at a toy kitchen in the section dedicated to local businesses, experience what it was like to card cotton and design a quilt in the section dedicated to frontiering, and there was an entire room set aside for them to color in. Based on these factors, I’m assuming that the museum expects the makeup of their visitors to partially consist of young families and school tours.
To make the physical location more effective as a public history site, I think I’d add some navigation cues to the space. It could be done creatively with wagon wheel marks or something similar, but some way to indicate where to go from one room to another would have been very helpful
Digital Site Experience
Design
The Denton County Courthouse on the Square Museum’s online presence strikes me as decidedly lackluster. The museum’s website is housed on Denton County’s website under a tab labeled “History and Culture.” From there, one can either view the museum’s hours by clicking the “Museums” tab and selecting the Courthouse, or one can view the “Exhibits” page, which is located in a nested menu under “Visit” to see exhibits that are located at the Courthouse, in the Historical Park, and online. It took several minutes to locate the relevant pages and, given that I anticipate some of their intended audience is elderly and likely less technologically literate, this could lead to people interested in their work not being able to access their online materials.
There is no single flow of traffic encouraged. Once one finds the exhibits page, they can view the exhibits that are currently at the museum, as well as exhibits that are no longer displayed and an online exhibit. These are all housed on the same page, which meant that I initially thought that some of the exhibits that are no longer there, such as “Making A Scene, An Exhibit on the Denton County Music Scene” were still able to be viewed.
I next visited their online exhibit, “40 For 40: Forty Artifacts for Forty Years of the Denton County Courthouse-on-the-Square Museum,” which went online March of 2020. The exhibit features forty artifacts related to Denton’s history – each item is accompanied by two relatively short paragraphs of text. I focus on what the items selected portray in the “Content” section of this piece, but in terms of the exhibit’s design, there are a few things I’d fix. I’d likely add a gallery view, so visitors could see a snapshot and the name of all forty items on a single page and click to view items they’re most interested in from that page view before being taken to an individual page for that item. Currently, the exhibit takes the form of two online articles with twenty items in each. There is no table of contents for these articles, so one only finds out what’s in the exhibit by scrolling through the whole thing.
The second potential issue is that images of the items are hosted on Flickr, rather than being featured in a slideshow of some sort native to the webpage they’re displayed on. Flickr keeps a count of the number of views each image has – the number of views I saw on these photos ranged from eight to thirteen. This exhibit has been up for six years, so these viewcounts indicate that people are not clicking out of the exhibit to see the pictures on Flickr. There is an image of each item on the webpage, but the aspect ratio is off, meaning that each picture is cropped so viewers see about 60% of the actual image. In terms of participatory or interactive elements, there are none as far as I can tell. The site is fairly static.
Content
The content of the “Forty Artifacts” online exhibit featured artifacts from families and events around Denton county that dates from the mid-19th century to the early 2000s. The recency of some of the items, such as a guitar signed by the Eli Young Band, which was formed at UNT in 2000, implicitly argues that what is considered “history” can include events that happened fairly recently. I was slightly surprised to see something this recent in the exhibit, since my general impression of local history projects is that they tend to favor older events with an often heavy emphasis on genealogy. This is not the case with either the Courthouse Museum’s physical or online presence.
Many of the objects in the “Forty Artifacts” exhibit are fairly ordinary items: a bakery sign, several dresses, furniture. Others are more unusual, such as a tomahawk, the cornerstone of the former jail, and a Bronze Star medal. There is a fairly inclusive selection of artifacts in this exhibit; objects in the exhibit represent many different industries and people. This is true of both the physical space inside the museum and of the objects highlighted online.
Creators
I’m assuming the website is maintained by the Denton County Historical Commission, but aside from a list of members housed on a separate page, I was unable to find much information about the website’s creators. There was no way to contact them as far as I could tell.
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