The word “museum” means house of the muses and is a designation of places that inspire, inform, entertain and delight. The history of the most well known museum in the country, the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., is an example of how an entire country can inspire one man to leave a firm mark in history.
Smithson began by leaving his inheritance to his only nephew with the stipulation that if his nephew would pass away with no heirs of his own, his bequest would then be deferred in whole to the United States. He left his fortune to the people of America with a single stipulation: the money be used to start a museum called the Smithsonian.
The sad yet strange note of Smithson’s legacy is the fact that he never had the opportunity to actually visit the land he viewed as the embodiment of the Enlightenment perspective. 
On May 26, 1828, an emaciated seventeen year old boy clad in filthy clothing stumbled into Nuremburg, Germany. The boy could not speak, except for his name: Kaspar Hauser. The only clues to his identity or origin came in the form of two unsigned letters found on his person.
The first, dated October 1812, was purportedly written by the boy’s mother and addressed to an unnamed guardian. It instructed the caregiver to take good care of her then-infant son and left instructions for Kaspar to be taken to the Army upon his seventeenth birthday. The second, undated letter was signed by a “poor laborer,” who claimed to have had raised the boy in secret and was now sending him to Nuremburg per his mother’s wishes. Despite the dramatic tales, cursory analysis revealed both letters to have been written not only recently, but by the same hand as well.
Though initially thought to be mentally challenged, Kaspar soon learned to read and write, and then went on to tell a disturbing tale. For as long as he could remember, he claimed, he had been confined to a windowless room – one so small that he had been unable to stand or move freely about it. Then one day, his unseen captor drugged him and he awoke to find himself on the road to Nuremburg.
The mysterious tale made for quite a news item in its day and soon all of Germany was stirring with gossip that Kaspar was the illegitimate offspring of one aristocrat or another (the most notorious and widespread of the rumors posited that he was, in fact, the true heir to the House of Baden). Though virtually every prominent figure in the region was subject to such speculation, the story’s popularity soon waned and the tale of Kaspar Hauser was relegated to the backburner.
That is until October 17, 1829 when Kaspar was found, bloodied and bleeding from the head. He claimed he had been attacked by a masked man, who had muttered cryptic threats before bludgeoning him mercilessly. Kaspar’s keepers, quite unsure of the story’s veracity, nonetheless decided to move him out of the city and to the small countryside town of Asbach for safekeeping.
It was there, four years later, that Kaspar returned from a walk in the snow to reveal a stab wound to the chest. Investigators rushed to the scene of the incident, whereupon they found a silk purse containing a coded message, written backwards in pencil and signed “M.L.O.” Despite the evidence of foul play, one fact rang out - in spite of Kaspar’s insistence that he had been stalked by persons unknown, only one set of footprints was ever found in the snow. Though at first his wound seemed only superficial, it steadily worsened and the boy known as Kaspar Hauser died on December 17, 1833. His final words were, “I didn’t do it to myself.”
| He was laid to rest in a nearby graveyard shortly thereafter, underneath a tombstone reading, in Latin, “Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious.” And it remains much the same today. As recently as 2002, a German university had been pursuing DNA analysis on Kaspar’s remains; in keeping with their subject’s mysterious nature, their results were unsuccessful at placing his parentage. |
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