Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The,
Jun 16, 1996
by DENNIS MCCANN
Violet Teeples was a woman who could collect Indian spears, a Nazi sword and a six-legged pig and still inspire a nun to put poetry to music.
She had a soft spot for the historically important and the curiously different, which explains a collection that ranges from the authentic arrowheads of Wisconsin's earliest people to an old dentist's chair in which a man once died of a cavity.
In his chest.
Arrowheads later. The death came back in '04, when poor Louis Gebhardt ("An admirable young man of 29 apparently without an enemy in the world," the papers said, despite all indications to the contrary) was found stabbed to death in the dental office he shared with his brother in Minnesota.
His killer was never found, though the investigation was revisited often through the years. But his brother, Robert Gebhardt, later practiced near here, and when he retired it was a cinch that any chair with such a mysterious pedigree would end up in Teeple's hands. It's stuff like that that makes the Thunderbird Museum in Hatfield and you probably knew I would get to this sooner or later the real McCoy.
The museum is in Jackson County on the shore of Lake Arbutus, where her father was the longtime superintendent of the power company that built the Hatfield dam. The museum building was originally a hotel that served workers who built the dam, but it was moved a short distance to its current location when Teeples got serious about collecting the past and anything else she found interesting.
"She found her first arrowhead when she was three years old," said Ellen Flood, who with her husband Robert Teeples' cousin bought the museum from her in 1986, shortly before Teeples died at age 73. "She loved Indian artifacts and gradually her collection grew.
"She was a lady of means. She owned a lot of Hatfield. Gradually she sold off most of her holdings and concentrated on her museum. This was her main thrust. This was her baby."
Her baby has 21 rooms filled with collectibles and curiosities from around the world. There is a doll room, a history room, a room for the shells she collected while spending winters on Sanibel Island, Fla. There are old photographs of Hatfield when it was a hopping place, autographed photos of presidents and governors and a piece of the meteorite a man found in his backyard in the tiny crossroads of Globe during the winter of 1973.
There is also the oldest switchboard in Eau Claire County and, as with the dentist's chair, there is a story behind it. In 1935, operator Ruby Bahr of nearby Fairchild saw a light flash on her board.
When she responded she heard two shots, then only silence.
Soon after she saw a green sedan speeding by her house headed toward Black River Falls. Bahr caught part of the license number, called police and said a crime might have been committed by the man and woman in the car.
Sure enough, the two were later captured and convicted of killing a filling station attendant, all thanks to Bahr. She later received a silver medal for her assistance and a check for $250, not to mention a story on the front page of the old Milwaukee Sentinel, which made a big deal of her heroism.
But the focus of Teeples' collection was Indian history. Hatfield was built on the old hunting grounds of the Winnebago now Ho-Chunk tribe and Teeples had a special fascination with and affection for Winnebago artifacts and people. Her museum has an original translation of the Winnebago Bible, works by the Sioux artist Ship Shee and local Winnebago painter Clarence Boyce Monegar, and a photograph of then-candidate John F. Kennedy in a feathered headdress with Winnebago chief Alvin Blackdeer.
Many of the artifacts she found herself, including a spear point used 10,000 years ago to hunt buffalo on the shores of Lake Arbutus.
Teeples made intricate displays depicting Indian life in the area, whether at war or in peace; in one room is a sword used against the Indian people at Wounded Knee, in another a depiction of the signing of a peace treaty between Indians and whites.
The story goes that one day Sister Claire Marie Wick the "fishing nun" from Eau Claire was in the museum and said, "Vi, how did you ever do all of this?" Vi said, "Somebody helped me," and pointed at the sky, which inspired Sister Claire Marie to write a song about Vi's collection and you can probably guess what happened next.
She put that in her museum, too.