Museum Curatorship in the National Park Service, 1904 - 1982

Lewis, Ralph

Museums have played vital roles in interpreting park resources and themes to the public. Like museums elsewhere, park museums are defined largely by the work of curators. Curators gather and care for collections of objects, record and study them, and use them in exhibits and other interpretive media. In the national parks work of this kind went on for years before any staff member received the title of curator, and many people with other titles— superintendents, rangers, naturalists, historians, archeologists, and clerical and custodial workers—still do such work. Conservators, museum registrars, exhibit designers, preparators, and technicians regularly collaborate with curators as different sorts of museum specialists. They are all part of curatorship to the extent that they help acquire, take care of, or use museum specimens. They have created much of the history in the pages that follow. Arthur C. Allen conceived and initiated this study while chief of the Division of Museum Services at the National Park Service's Harpers Ferry Center. He hoped that a more complete picture of how curatorial work had developed in the Park Service might clarify long-standing problems his division faced. Ten months, he thought, should suffice for someone familiar with the background of the museum program to search out and compile a trustworthy digest of the facts. A purchase order dated August 3, 1978, outlined the project's proposed scope and provided for incidental expenses the research might entail. This writer promptly began work, but the sources proved much more voluminous and scattered than anticipated. Although the study gathered material Allen found useful, research and writing were far from complete when he transferred from the museum program to the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1983. Chief Curator Ann Hitchcock, who inherited the curatorial problems in acute form upon her appointment in 1980, encouraged continuation of the project. It became apparent early that a review limited to curatorial matters in a narrow sense would fail to place them adequately in context. The curatorial imperatives had been so closely interwoven into the whole fabric of museum work in the parks that they resisted proper analysis in isolation. Consequently, this study first traces growth of the museum program as a whole. The first five chapters chronicle museum development in the national parks from the earliest park museums to 1982. The sixth chapter examines the distinctive development of furnished historic structure museums in the parks. The last three chapters focus more sharply on the curatorial aspects of park museums: the collections, their management, and their care.

Museum Curatorship in the National Park Service, 1904 - 1982

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