Last Friday morning, I sat down at my computer and opened an email from Chuck Ulmann, Collections Curator at the Sanderson Museum. The news, while not unexpected, hit like a Mack Truck.
“I received a call from Bruce, Tom's son. Tom passed away peacefully last night about 7 p.m.”
Until Thursday, Thomas R. Thompson, was the last of the 5 founding members of the Sanderson Museum on Creek Road in Chadds Ford. Appointed by Andrew Wyeth in 1967, Thompson would become its first curator and second president. And although he turned 96 last month, everyone still referred to him as Tommy.
When Chris Sanderson died in November 1966, his long-time friend Andrew Wyeth gathered four men to save the contents of the old tenant house on Creek Road where Chris lived.
The inside of the house was knee-deep in newspapers, magazines, three generations of Wyeth originals, souvenirs, important autographs and letters, photographs, books, personal keepsakes and historic artifacts. Chris’s bed was so cluttered that friends said he could only sleep on about one third of it.
The side porch sagged under the weight of several decades of newspapers, as each time his name appeared in print, Chris bought two or three copies. The porch also contained an old icebox, the contents of which included two one-pound cakes of lard stuck to the shelves. Chris’s neighbors related no one had purchased lard since his mother died — in December 1943.
Today we would have recognized Chris as a hoarder. A life-long historian and collector, the hoarding kicked in after his mother, with whom he had lived his whole life, died on Christmas morning.
As per Sanderson’s will, the job of sorting out the eight-room house to write his biography, ( “Chris” © 1973) now fell to Thompson — a man with no formal training in museum sciences, but who as the executive office manager at Schramm’s Incorporated in West Chester, had an innate sense of detail, order, preservation and documentation.
As other members of the newly organized museum board repaired, painted and built display shelves, Thompson sorted through more than 4,000 miscellaneous pieces of paper on which Chris had jotted notes about someone’s funeral, a record snow storm, an auto accident in Chadds Ford or the anniversary of an historic event. These he chronologically filed in three-ring binders of protector pages.
Thompson organized thousands of photos in those binders with archival photo pockets, documenting the history and people of old Chadds Ford, many of which have now been loaned for exhibits to the Brandywine River Museum and Chadds Ford Historical Society.
He carefully preserved in two binders of archival sleeves more than 80 letters written to Chris from Civil War veterans, both Union and Confederate.
Thompson also compiled binders of letters of provenance on all-important items. In those early days before computers and museum software like “Past Perfect,” he documented each item in the museum on 3-by-5 index cards with a photo and description.
I remember one day I asked about a specific letter to Chris from a Civil War officer. He said, “You’ll find that in file cabinet F, drawer 2, in the third white binder from the front.”
He knew the whole collection that way.
Karen Kuder Finkelstein, filmmaker at Archaeo Films in New York City, who interviewed Thompson for her 2006 Sanderson documentary, “Cannonballs, Anecdotes and Artifacts”, noted, “… Tommy, in particular, was one of the finest people I've had the pleasure to know. Without Tom, there would not be a film, book or a museum. He was, and in spirit shall remain, the force behind it all.”
Several years ago, I drove up to Willow Lakes, where Tommy had retired, to have lunch with him. When I signed in at the desk, the receptionist said, “We have two Tommy Thompsons. Do you want big Tommy or little Tommy?
Quiet and small of stature, I knew which one he was of course. But to me, and those of us at the Sanderson who looked up to him, he was a giant without equal.
About Sally Denk Hoey
Sally Denk Hoey, is a Gemini - one part music and one part history. She holds a masters degree cum laude from the School of Music at West Chester University. She taught 14 years in both public and private school. Her CD "Bard of the Brandywine" was critically received during her almost 30 years as a folk singer. She currently cantors masses at St Agnes Church in West Chester where she also performs with the select Motet Choir. A recognized historian, Sally serves as a judge-captain for the south-east Pennsylvania regionals of the National History Day Competition. She has served as president of the Brandywine Battlefield Park Associates as well as the Sanderson Museum in Chadds Ford where she now curates the violin collection. Sally re-enacted with the 43rd Regiment of Foot and the 2nd Pennsylvania Regiment for 19 years where she interpreted the role of a campfollower at encampments in Valley Forge, Williamsburg, Va., Monmouth, N.J. and Lexington and Concord, Mass. Sally is married to her college classmate, Thomas Hoey, otherwise known as "Mr. Sousa.”
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