After 30 years, Karpeles Manuscript Museum to close in Jacksonville
Jacksonville's Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in Springfield will close in the next few weeks as the museum's parent company reorganizes its collection.
The museum, open since 1992, is one of more than a dozen Karpeles facilities spread around the country to display founder David Karpeles' collection of rare documents and manuscripts. Karpeles, a mathematician, inventor and real estate investor, passed away in 2022, leaving his family to deal with the collection.
Cheryl Karpeles Alleman, his daughter, is now chief financial officer for Karpeles Manuscript Library Museums. She's also the one who convinced her father to open a branch in a former First Church of Christ, Scientist building between downtown and Springfield. She said the decision to close several locations around the country, including Jacksonville, wasn't an easy one.
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"We’re kind of charged with the situation of making sure that these museums in some form or fashion will be here forever," she said. "We have to make some hard decisions so that the museums as a whole can stand the test of time."
The Jacksonville museum building, which was built in 1921, has maintenance issues and flooding issues that influenced the decision to close it, she said.
"It is hard for a nonprofit to handle this kind of thing," Alleman said.
Richard Minor, director of the Jacksonville location, was also planning to move on, so the timing seemed right, she said.
She added that the Jacksonville museum is still open, probably through the end of January. Admission is free, as it has always been at all Karpeles museums.
Karpeles will still have 11 locations after the closing, including a new "mini-museum" off St. George Street in St. Augustine. That spot is just about 100 square feet in St. George's Row, a collection of indoor shops and restaurants. It displays replicas of documents from the Karpeles collection and draws better than Alleman expected. She said it has documents that would make many universities and museums jealous, but the most popular display is a collection of original drawings from early Disney films.
That's in fitting with her father's philosophy of reaching out to the younger generations, she said.
"He really saw a change in attitudes toward things like going to museums, with the advent of video games and things like that," Alleman said. "He wanted to change that."
Karpeles has one of the largest private collections of historic documents and manuscripts in the United States, with more than 10,000 pieces totaling about a million pages. Among the manuscripts displayed at the museum over the years were Handel's Messiah, copied in the hand of Beethoven; Einstein's Theory of Relativity; the first printing of the Ten Commandments from the Gutenberg Bible in 1455; the Confederate Constitution; Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Amelia Earhart's Certificate of Landing for her solo flight across the Atlantic.
Alleman said the manuscripts housed in Jacksonville will be spread through other Karpeles locations, including a new one opening next month in Lake Mary, which will be the new headquarters for the museums.
She couldn't say what would happen to the building at 101 W. First St., other than to say it will probably be sold in the next month or two and that it isn't currently on the market. She said FSCJ, which has a campus near the museum, approached Karpeles about buying the building in the past but is no longer interested in purchasing it.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Karpeles Manuscript Museum closing in Jacksonville
