Last weekend was the grand opening of the Park City Museum. You were probably there at least it felt like everybody in the world was there. The place was packed, and it might well have been the social event of the season. The museum expansion was ambitious by any standard. In light of the economy for the last year or so, it seemed downright impossible. But it happened, and the end result is stunning. If you haven’t been in, or if your only view was the packed grand opening, get the kids and go back.
The exhibits cover it all, from the mining days to the ski-resort development. There are criminals and Silver Queens, the dungeon and a barroom. It’s got the railroad and the stagecoach, a grocery store and the gondola from Park City Resort. The displays are entertaining, engaging, and interactive. You can push the plunger on the dynamite control and hear the powder explode. The “mega-mine” is a three-story-tall ant farm of a silver mine with horse carts and train cars and hoists all moving around inside it. The nuts and bolts of the actual mining beneath our feet are hard to understand, until you push a button and the exhibit explains how they hollowed out the earth without it falling in around them.
Satisfying as the museum is as an experience (better than any movie I’ve seen the last year), it really shines as an example of a community project. The mob there for the Friday opening all had a hand in making it happen. There were the donors who had written huge checks and then helped dust artifacts that had been in storage for years. There were lots of people who had donated a little and helped out in other ways. Everybody there had some piece of the action. There was a sense of ownership among the people there that first night that really explains how it all happened. It is our museum.
For most of us in Park City, our roots don’t go back to the mining days. That isn’t our history. Most people living here now arrived well after the mine-to-resort transition was complete. It’s a history of people who are, for the most part, long gone. Theirs was a fascinating story, and we inhabit the town they created, but really aren’t an extension of it. It’s a little like a software company moving its offices into an old textile mill in Massachusetts. The drive shafts that powered the looms are still bolted to the ceilings above the cubicles, but serve no real purpose other than reminding us that something significant went before us.
I’ve got a special affection for the old city hall building, having spent several years working there. The cubbyhole that was my office is now part of an open gallery, but my window is still there. Years ago, I helped with a fundraiser to pay for the restoration of the Kimball Brothers stagecoach. It looked solid as new when the Kimball family donated it. But when the coach restoration guy got into it, he found a lot of dry rot. Some of the wood sections disintegrated when he tried to clean the paint off. So it cost a lot more than planned.
We put on a big horse-drawn extravaganza in the field behind the library with blacksmiths, livery stables, carriages, and on and on. We brought in a four-horse team to pull the stagecoach. It was going to be spectacular. Instead, it rained like it has never rained before. Nobody came to the event except a couple of ducks. Since we were all dressed up with no place to go, the teamster let me drive the stagecoach. OK, so it’s not like I was controlling the thundering hooves charging up Parleys Canyon in a cloud of dust. It was all of 100 yards in the park, and the horses did most of the driving themselves. But I drove the Kimball Brothers’ stage.
In the noise and hubbub of the grand opening, everybody I talked to had a similar connection to something in the museum. They drank at that bar, spent a night in that jail cell, worked at the resort loading the gondola, or rode in the skier subway. Rich Martinez worked in that mine.
It’s a little difficult to see things you participated in stuffed and mounted as a museum exhibit. I’m really not that old. The exhibits do a great job of bringing Park City’s transition from a mining camp to a ski resort to life, telling the full story. For those of us who were part of that most recent, tumultuous, transitional chapter, well, it’s history now.
Congratulations to Sandra Morrison, the History Chicks, and the Historical Society board for building a community treasure.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.