FRED OLDS (1853-1935) The father of the North Carolina Museum of History, posing in a Confederate uniform.

Fred Olds: Father of the Museum of History

rederick Augustus Olds, born in 1853, graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1872 and embarked upon a career in journalism. He served as city editor for the Raleigh News and Observer and kept a hand in the news business for four decades. Olds served in the State Guard and was appointed colonel (a title he would carry for life) on the staff of Gov. Zebulon B. Vance in 1877. By the mid-1880s, Olds had begun to collect materials as a consequence of a growing interest in North Carolina history. In 1902 the civic-minded Olds agreed to donate his large private collection to the state of North Carolina. His artifacts were merged with the state's meager collection of donated items and Olds became the collector of the expanded "Hall of History"—a position he cherished for the next thirty years.

Dissatisfaction with Olds appeared almost immediately. Stephen B. Weeks, a scholar hailed as North Carolina's first "professional" historian, complained in 1904 that Olds "brought Southern scholarship into the most well deserved contempt" and proclaimed Olds's work "a horrible example to be avoided." Yet Olds embraced his job with a passion held by few during that era. In 1914 the Hall of History came under the aegis of the North Carolina Historical Commission. Olds soon made his way to every county in the state in search of historical gems and the museum's holdings grew steadily. Unofficially, the dapper colonel assumed the mantle of "State Host" in Raleigh. Exuding warmth and charm, he gained a reputation for delighting thousands of tourists and schoolchildren in the Capital City. In declining health Olds retired in 1934 and died the following year at eighty-one.

Over time it became fashionable for historians and museum professionals to disparage Olds and to snicker at his eccentric enthusiasm for North Carolina history. "Olds was a newspaper man," R. D. W. Connor said in a talk to Archives and History staff in 1948, "and he always looked at everything from a news point of view . . . [he was] very careless of his history." Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Olds was never officially recognized as a curator or historian and that he had no professional training. His title of "collector" for the Hall of History was an apt one, for it was Olds's unparalleled zeal in gathering objects related to the state's past that built the foundation of the present North Carolina Museum of History. In addition to thousands of artifacts, Olds collected many of the manuscripts that now reside in the State Archives.

Despite the lingering denigration of the man lauded in the News and Observer as North Carolina's "most useful, most popular, and most loved citizen," it must be acknowledged that no cadre of museum professionals existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to build and expand the Hall of History. Overshadowing his role as "State Host," Fred Olds's enduring legacy dwells within the exhibits and sprawling storage facilities of the modern museum—a respected institution in which his core collection presently resides among enormously expanded holdings that now include more than 250,000 artifacts.

Mark Anderson Moore
Research Branch

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