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COLUMN: How a mummy made it to Iredell

Museums’ prized possession the focus of Thursday program

Posted: Saturday, September 19, 2015 3:09 pm

By Joel Reese

The Iredell County Public Library will host a special program titled “The Mummy Treasure of Al Faiyum” at 7 p.m. Thursday. The event will spotlight Iredell County’s own 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy in the collection of the Iredell Museums.

Museums Executive Director Melinda Herzog will present the program. The mummy will not be present as it is being prepared for an upcoming public viewing at the museum, but Herzog will give a history on the mummy and give an update on the museum’s plans to put the mummy back on display. 

No one knows the name of the 22nd dynasty Egyptian lady, but local lore has it that the school children of Iredell County named her Margaret years ago, so “Margaret the Mummy” is the name she goes by today. The first question that pops into your mind when you first hear about Margaret is, “How on earth did an Egyptian mummy end up in a local museum in Statesville?" Well, it basically goes like this.

About 125 years ago, Egypt was visited by an American Baptist missionary traveling to Luxor. While there, he made a desert excursion and found a tomb with a mummy. Naturally, he takes the mummy out of the tomb, packs it up and brings it back to the United States. He then donates the wrapped corpse to the museum at his alma mater, the Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pa. Today we and certainly the Egyptian people would consider this grave robbing, but in the 1880s Europeans and Americans were regularly going on tours to Egypt and thought of taking mummies or artifacts from Egyptian tombs as nothing more than souvenir collecting.

The practice of robbing tombs for mummies was nothing new. In the 1500s doctors and pharmacists would grind up the limbs from a looted mummy into powder to dispense as medicine. How the Egyptians came up with the idea of mummifying their dead came naturally. In antiquity Egyptians would sometimes bury their dead in shallow graves in the desert. Later, the Egyptians found that the dry sand and air had “preserved” the bodies. They went on to develop body mummification into a science that normally took 70 days. They practiced mummification for over 3,000 years and even mummified cats, birds, bulls, and other animals.

In the 1950s, the Crozer decided to close its museum and began seeking new homes for its collection. Richard Casanova was an author and paleontologist living in Statesville in 1957. He was also on the board of trustees at Iredell Museums and heard about the Crozer museum closing. It was Casanova who negotiated the donation of the mummy to Iredell Museums. On July 13, 1957, the R&L carried a front-page photograph of technicians Shirley Alexander and Nancy Boger at Iredell Memorial Hospital X-raying the Museum’s new mummy which they referred to as “Mummy George.”

When Iredell Hospital radiologist Dr. Irvin E. Shafer checked the X-rays, he found that the mummy was actually a woman which he estimated to be between 35 and 45 years old. You might wonder why Casanova thought it was a good idea to bring a mummy to Iredell Museums. You have to remember that when the Arts and Science Museum started in 1956, it literally had no collection and no building. The R&L reported on April 4, 1956, that an Arts and Science Museum had been formed on April 3 and that plans were made to seek a charter. After considering the Vance House and the Recreation Center as locations to put a museum, the board reached a 10-year lease agreement with the city of Statesville to use the Old Pump Station site outside of Statesville.

We now had the Arts and Science Museum organization with directors and bylaws and a museum building, but nothing inside for people to see. This happened in Caldwell County when they created the Caldwell Heritage Museum in Lenoir. They had an organization and a building, but nothing inside. Realizing that visitors wanted something to see the museum supporters brought things from home to put in the museum. There was a matchbook collection, a model car collection, a camera collection, and even a collection of Oriental art and clothing brought back from China by a veteran. It was the same with the Arts and Science Museum. Ms. Margaret might not have had an Iredell County connection, but without her to bring visitors in we might not have a museum today.

Joel Reese is the local history librarian at the Iredell County Public Library in Statesville.