The History of Our Soil

INTRODUCTION

“The History of Our Soil” is an interactive exhibt embedded in Henry Shaw’s Tower Grove House at the Missouri Botanical Garden that shared the history of enslaved individuals who were enslaved by Shaw and who lived and worked at what would become a quintessential St. Louis institution. In creating an interactive history experience that is focused on reparative justice, with information taken from the Henry Shaw Papers, records from the garden, and archival research, the project showcases how the garden’s beauty has been shaped alongside histories of forced labor and displacement.

Meet the team!

Faculty Mentor

Community Partner: The Missouri Botanical Garden

The 2027 class of CODES Scholars partners with the Missouri Botanical Garden through the theme of reparative justice, an approach that centers healing, accountability, and the repair of past harms. Drawing on MOBOT’s archives and Henry Shaw’s papers, this project explores how the Garden’s history can be shared with greater honesty and care. Working alongside Michelle Bonner, Robbie Hart, and Andrew Colligan, CODES Scholars examine the institution’s history of enslavement, the erasure of Black and Brown communities connected to Shaw Nature Reserve, and the Indigenous knowledge and cultural context reflected in Herbarium specimens. Through this work, the project helps MOBOT tell these stories with intentionality and sensitivity while creating more meaningful ways for visitors to engage with them.

PROJECT SUMMARY

We wanted to promote understanding of the history of enslavement connected to the Missouri Botanical Garden through an interactive, accessible, and reflective public history experience. By using stations, shortened documents, and QR access to full archival materials, the project aims to help participants engage more directly with the stories, records, and silences that surround this history.

Our vision was to create an experience that welcomes a wide audience while encouraging a deeper relationship to the Garden, its archives, and the histories that have too often remained in the background. The project imagines a space where visitors not only admire the Garden as a site of beauty but also recognize it as a place shaped by human labor, inequality, and historical erasure. In that sense, the interactive learning pathway is meant to invite acknowledgment, reflection, and a more honest relationship to institutional memory.

The labor from the enslaved African Americans on Henry Shaw’s properties is connected to the garden and surrounding buildings there. The labor played a critical role in the maintenance and development of the garden that is now a part of St. Louis history, and yet the stories remain absent from institutional narratives. This history matters because St. Louis was connected to slavery and indigenous displacement. These stories will be more visible and encourage visitors to reflect on how most public institutions can still remember the past, and stories that should be prioritized.

The final product takes the form of an interactive learning pathway made up of a series of stations that guide visitors through the history of enslavement connected to Henry Shaw and the Missouri Botanical Garden. Each station is designed to feel clear, consistent, and inviting so that participants can immediately understand the focus of the material without being overwhelmed by too much information at once. The experience should feel educational and reflective, while still remaining accessible to visitors who may be encountering this history for the first time.

Our “Why”

One of the strongest parts of this project is the reason behind it. From the beginning, the work required us to maintain a sense of responsibility. It was exciting to approach the project with the idea that we could help bring forward stories that had once been overlooked or silenced, but that excitement also came with the realization that this history could not be handled lightly. The more we worked with the documents, the clearer it became that this project needed to do more than present information. It needed to create an experience that encouraged people to stop, read, and think.

Our resulting project is rooted in the desire to make hidden histories visible in a way that feels engaging rather than distant. While a traditional display can present historical documents, our interactive format gives visitors a reason to move with intention, follow a guided route, and connect each station to a broader story. That matters because the history of enslavement should not be reduced to a few isolated facts or documents. It should be encountered as something that shaped individual lives, institutions, and the meaning of place itself.

The project also reflects a great deal of care in how that history is presented. Building it required working through logistical challenges, a large volume of documents, and moments when the historical connections were not immediately clear. Rather than weakening the project, those challenges strengthened it. They pushed us to think more carefully about what we chose to show, how we chose to show it, and what kind of response we wanted to create in the audience. As a result, the final experience is designed not only to share information, but also to encourage visitors to pause, reflect, and engage with this history in a more meaningful way.

Reparative Justice

This project engages in the work of reparative justice because it is grounded in truth-telling, access, and public engagement. Reparative justice is not only about recognizing that harm happened. It is also about asking how institutions can acknowledge that harm in ways that are meaningful, visible, and socially responsible. A project like this contributes to that work by taking archival materials that might otherwise remain distant and making them part of a shared public encounter.

The interactive learning pathway format is especially appropriate because it asks participants to do more than observe. They must move through the space, read, interpret, and reflect. That shifts from passive viewing to active engagement matters and has a cognitive impact. It encourages people to understand the Garden not as a neutral backdrop, but as a place tied to histories of enslavement, power, and exclusion. If we center those histories, the project resists the tendency to let beauty erase violence or to let institutions tell only the most comfortable version of their past.

The project also supports reparative justice by increasing access. Each station provides a short, readable entry point into the historical material, while the QR code gives participants access to the fuller document. That structure respects different levels of engagement. Some visitors may pause for a brief encounter, while others may want to explore the archives more deeply. Either way, the project creates a path toward historical visibility and reflection, which is one meaningful step in reparative work.

Research Questions

Across two years of research, we focused on the following guiding questions to plan our exhibit:

• What documents would be the most important to consider? Primary documents going back to 1828 are the core documents, including bills of sale.
• One of our main challenges was being sensitive about our subject matter. How could we share this information in a way that honors enslaved individuals and was honest about Shaw’s role in enslavement while still acknowledging his importance for St. Louis?
• How can visuals, movement through space, and digital access can improve engagement by visitors?  How can complex situation topics like this be presented in a way that the audience can understand

RESEARCH METHODS

Our project focuses on archival based research in collaboration with staff members from MOBOT. Working with Michelle Bonner and Andrew Colligan, we examined primary source materials connected to Henry Shaw and the garden itself. Research included reviewing handwritten documents, financial documents like the bills of sale, property records and census material that were in the MOBOT collection of archives. In conducting this research Ale and I wanted to not only keep in mind identifying what appeared in the archives, but also some things we found that were missing and did not fit into the rest of our puzzle. Most records provided limited information about workers and indigenous communities connected to these spaces. These gaps became important because it showcased how certain things erased in history operate without archival evidence.

FINDINGS + THEMES

[coming soon]!

PROJECT DELIVERABLES

To create consistency, every station follows the same basic structure: a title, a short document excerpt or plain-language summary, a QR code linking to the fuller archival source or supporting material, and a question or prompt that asks participants to reflect on what the document reveals. This repeated format helps visitors know what to expect as they move from one station to the next, while still allowing each document to tell a distinct part of the larger story. The layout is intentionally designed to balance accessibility with depth. The shortened text gives visitors enough context to understand the significance of the document while standing at the station, without requiring them to read a full archival record on the spot. At the same time, the QR code offers a deeper level of engagement for participants who want to explore the original document, read a transcript, or learn more about the historical context. In this way, the pathway welcomes both brief interaction and more sustained learning.

CONCLUSION

[coming soon]

Appendix: Supplementary Materials

Works Cited

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