Tom Johnson, 83, lives in the museum that is his home. In his own non-digital way, he curates his family’s legacy, the estimated 35,000 books and manuscripts that share his 113-year-old meandering and musty house on the Osage River.
Johnson has built wooden corridors that link the family three-story home to the family library, built in 1899 by his grandfather for a collection of 8,000 books, and another that connects the house to the annex library, built in 1990 when the library overflowed. Grandfather Thomas Moore Johnson (1851-1919) was known as the “sage of the Osage.”
There are two tours a month, it looks like. One of these days, I shall make a pilgrimage.
