New museum features letters by famous prisoners

FORT WAYNE – A new museum of historical manuscripts has opened with an exhibit of letters Gandhi, Napoleon, presidential assassins and other famous inmates wrote from prison.

“Letters from the Pen” – as in penitentiary – debuted with Tuesday’s opening of The Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in a former church in Fort Wayne.

Educational Curator Olivia Emry said the exhibit features original documents written by people who were either imprisoned or fell out of favor with local authorities.

Aside from letters by Napoleon after the French general was arrested, Indian pacifist Mohandas K. Gandhi and militant abolitionist John Brown, the collection also includes the written confessions of the assassins of Presidents William McKinley and James Garfield.

Leon F. Czolgosz, the deranged anarchist who killed McKinley in 1901, tried to explain in his letter his motive for that crime.

“I Killed President McKinley because I done my duty. I didn’t believe one Man should have so much service and another man should have none,” he wrote.

Emry said the new museum – which is open Tuesday through Saturday and charges no admission – is good news for Fort Wayne after the loss of the Lincoln Museum earlier this year.

“There really isn’t anything like this around,” she said.

The Karpeles Manuscript Library boasts of being the world’s largest private collection of original manuscripts and documents. It was founded in 1983 by California real estate magnates David and Marsha Karpeles.

The Fort Wayne museum is the 10th Karpeles museum to open across the country. Each has a goal of stimulating interest in learning, especially in children.

“I wish to renew that feeling I had as a child: that hope, that pride, that sense of purpose,” David Karpeles wrote in a statement. “I believe we learned those feelings by our exposure to the accomplishments of our predecessors.”

Despite the museum’s free access, its first day wasn’t crowded. Emry said only one person, a friend, stopped in to visit.

But she said she has been busy working with area schools to set up exhibits and provide copies of documents to educators for use in instruction.