History of Bergstrom-Mahler Museum

Bergstrom-Mahler Museum originated more than a century ago, in the imagination of a young girl in upstate New York. Born in 1872, Evangeline Hoystradt Bergstrom grew up in comfortable surroundings in the college town of Ithaca. It was as a young girl that her now legendary love affair with paperweights began.

As Evangeline was to recall, it all started with one of her grandmother's long lost paperweights. It was filled with tiny glass flowers, or florets, which the young Evangeline found endlessly fascinating. "That paperweight was of the millefiori type I learned later, and it amused me by the hour to try and find two similar florets. When the old house was dismantled, that was the one thing I wanted, but living a long distance away it was picked up by someone near there and never seen again."

Years later, as the wife of Neenah industrialist John Nelson Bergstrom, Evangeline happened across a similar paperweight at an antique show in Florida. She bought it, and so began a collection that one day would form the core of the Museum that now bears the Bergstrom name.

While Evangeline Bergstrom's grand obsession with paperweights provided a primary collection for the new Museum, Mrs. Bergstrom would never have claimed that she alone was responsible for what was to become the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum. When the Museum opened in 1959 as the John Nelson Bergstrom Art Center and Museum, it represented the culmination of years of community effort.

Still, the role the Bergstroms played can hardly be minimized. There would have been no Museum without John Nelson Bergstrom's decision to bequeath their mansion to the City of Neenah along with Evangeline's collections.

As the name of the Museum reveals, another couple, Ernst and Carol Mahler, were also instrumental in its success. Ernst Mahler, an Austrian-born inventor and Kimberly-Clark executive, first became involved after John Nelson Bergstrom's death in 1951. As head of a local citizens' group, his leadership and organizational skills were crucial in turning the Bergstroms' bequests into the reality of a museum.

The Mahler's involvement intensified after the Museum opened, with both Ernst and Carol serving as president of the Museum Foundation. But it is for another reason--the donation of their splendid Germanic glass collection--that the Mahlers' are remembered today.

As art scholar and glass collector Paul Hollister once noted, the Bergstrom and Mahler Collections taken together are what makes the Museum special. "The two great strengths of the Bergstrom--glass paperweights and related objects, and Germanic glass--form a combination unknown to me in any other museum, though other museums, of course, have some of each. It is this specialized combination that sets the Bergstrom apart..."

Today, with nearly 3,000 pieces, Bergstrom-Mahler Museum is known worldwide for its Permanent Collections of glass. But it would be a mistake to think of the Museum solely in terms of paperweights and Germanic glass.

In addition to its Collection resources the Museum is also a community arts center. Its educational offerings include art classes for all ages, along with workshops, lectures and demonstration programs related to the Permanent Collections and temporary exhibitions. The Museum's school outreach program reaches more than 2,500 third graders each year. In addition, the Museum is committed to presenting "bigger, bolder, and better" temporary exhibitions-exhibitions that are enhanced by lectures, tours, demonstrations, and special events.

Expanded in 1965, 1986, and again in 1997 to meet the needs of its growing public, the Museum now greets more than 25,000 visitors each year. As Bergstrom-Mahler Museum continues to grow, it has proudly taken on its mission as a responsive community arts center, and as a steward of a world-renowned paperweight collection.