Museum, But Not in a Museum
Image: The archives, library, and museum staff in front of Roosevelt Lodge on a park-wide tour.
By Fiona Noonan
Undeclared, 2016
Summer Intern at Yellowstone’s Heritage and Research Center
Read about our summer interns on the Out West student blog. Throughout the summer, the Center's interns and Research Assistants will be sending in virtual postcards, snapshots and reports on their summer work.
When people look at Yellowstone’s Heritage and Research Center (HRC) in Gardiner, Montana, a few questions may come to mind:
- What is that obscenely large building?
- What happens inside?
- Is it a penitentiary?
As a result, the place I’m spending my summer creates plenty of confusion for Yellowstone employees, citizens of Gardiner, and oft-confused tourists.
The easiest question to answer is the one about the penitentiary. Not an inmate in sight, even if the building is nearly windowless.
The other two aren’t always so easy.
The answer to question 1 is that the HRC is many things, but definitely not a museum. Instead, it's a center that houses the museum collection, archives, a research library, the park historian, the archaeology lab, the wildlife health lab, and a herbarium. Together, the different components of the HRC work to document, preserve, and ultimately make available to the public Yellowstone's cultural and natural history. That answers question 2 pretty well.
I've learned that people don't always understand that, though. They figure this giant building must be open to the public and full of exhibits, and then are dismayed to find only a small lobby exhibit (currently on Thomas Moran, the artist from the 1871 Hayden expedition to Yellowstone) and limited tour opportunities.
The curatorial space was never intended as a museum, but rather to facilitate museums elsewhere in the park. My role in that is to catalog new objects that come into the collection, help maintain the collections we already have, and inventory the hundreds of thousands of objects we're responsible for.
The inventory has been the most daunting task so far—imagine a scavenger hunt for only several hundred items out of hundreds of thousands. Luckily, Dré, the other museum intern, is there to help out. Together we've sifted through thousands of archeological finds, hundreds of post cards, and some more unexpected objects, like a dental bridge found in a geyser decades ago.
It's incredible how much I've learned about the park's history just by looking at the pictures people have taken, the souvenirs they've kept, and the tools they've used. For my remaining six weeks I'll be working on my own exhibit about a specific part of that history known as Mission 66. By the end of the summer I'll of course know far more about Yellowstone than I ever did before, but the history of this place is so rich and complex that it's impossible to ever grasp all of it.
For me, it's also still hard to grasp the fact that I actually live here. It's so beautiful that it's impossible to ever be unhappy, and there's so much to do that I can't ever be bored. I get to hike almost every day, see wildlife everywhere, and live and work with some of the kindest, most interesting people I've ever met. I can already tell that it's going to be difficult to leave this place so aptly named "Wonderland."
Read more at the Out West Blog for Summer Interns »
