Taming the West, One Linen Napkin at a Time

Posted on December 10, 2014 by admin

Meet Fred Harvey, Mary Colter, Erna Fergusson and a bevy of Harvey Girls. Setting the Standard: The Fred Harvey Company and Its Legacy (the first major installation to join our main exhibit, Telling New Mexico), gives voice to the ways that New Mexico changed the Harvey Company—and the ways that Harvey changed New Mexico. We chatted with Meredith Davidson, curator of 19th- and 20th-century collections, about how it came to be.

What was your reaction on getting assigned to do this exhibition?

I was thrilled. When I started, I knew only the surface level of Fred Harvey history, but began to see him as a lens that overlaps with almost any topic you can imagine in the Southwest. Now I like to say, “All roads lead to Harvey!”

What did you decide to focus on?

The turning points in the company’s history that were directly related to New Mexico. The Alvarado was an early destination hotel and the company’s western hub. La Fonda (postcard image above) shows the company’s move away from trackside-only locations. Indian Detours were the start of regional tourism. And the Harvey Girls’ genesis happened in Raton.

Where did you go during your research?

Kansas City, Leavenworth, California, and Arizona. I was also lucky to work closely with descendants of the Harvey family here and in Chicago, several of whom lent materials for the exhibit, including a stunning copper gong that once hung in the company’s corporate headquarters. After a winding search, I tracked down the daughter of someone known in the FredHead community for acquiring “all things Harvey.” Her father had passed away in 2010 and everyone wondered what had happened to Skip Gentry’s collection. Well, it is in about every room of his daughter’s home in North California. I spent two full days with her peeking in binders, opening boxes and moving framed pieces. I was ecstatic when she offered to lend us several of the key gems.

`My favorite item in the exhibit is….’

I really can’t pick just one, but I did fall in love with a portrait of an Indian Detours Courier named Amelia McFie. I had met her family in Las Cruces and anticipated holding a place in the exhibit to tell her story, but when I saw the portrait I thought, “She’s so young and well put together!” She helps illustrate how the story of Fred Harvey is not just the large hotels and the intricate systems of high-level hospitality, but the individual lives that were touched and sometimes rerouted by opportunities offered by the company.

How will this exhibit affect the Harvey story?

This is the first long-term exhibit dedicated to the company’s history. I hope it brings a new level of awareness to the topic and shows visitors as well as researchers that there is still so much to learn and so much more to explore—the 1915 World’s Fair in San Diego, the women in the company, the men who married Harvey Girls or worked in the establishments, the management styles that impact today’s hospitality industry, and the clever advertising promoting the Southwest. I hope this exhibit will encourage people to see the New Mexico History Museum, its library and photo archives, as resources for this history and then go out and see the remnants of this history in the Southwest.

History Sleuths Find a Few Good Firemen

Posted on October 2, 2014 by admin

While prepping for an August talk, Photo Curator Daniel Kosharek and Imaging Specialist Hannah Abelbeck reached into a box and pulled out a mystery. It was a poorly documented ambrotype of a group of five men whose jackets had been painted bright red. Background details included a viga and corbel, hinting at a New Mexico provenance. Was it from one of the Civil War campaigns that occurred in New Mexico?

Mark MacKenzie, director of the Museum of New Mexico’s Conservation Lab, provided the first clues by working on the photo’s sorry condition. Abelbeck then scanned it at a high resolution, revealing even more.

She searched for information about red uniforms of the era, but found nothing. When she magnified the image, the men’s hats revealed intriguing symbols: a star, a cannon and a bucket. When she flipped the mirror image, what had seemed like Southwestern hieroglyphics turned into letters: “FFC.” Could we be looking at a fire company?

The men had an air of official business about them. One held a gavel; he and another had rolled-up documents.

We posted the image on our Facebook page and sent a query to the Historical Society of New Mexico. Soon, interested folks were weighing in with their ideas. Everyone slowly closed in on the idea of this being the early Santa Fe Fire Company, and a call to the modern-day version yielded a hopeful response.

Assistant Chief Jan Snyder said the photo looked very similar to one in the department’s mini-museum off Cerrillos Road and could depict a bucket brigade.

The Territorial Legislature created the Santa Fe Fire Company on Jan. 26, 1861. A photographer might well have captured an inaugural image, and ambrotypes were a popular medium between 1850–1865.

Abelbeck kept at it and soon spotted a similarity between the man seated on the left and one of the men in a famous portrait (left, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives 009826) of Civil War-era figures, including Kit Carson, seated in the middle. Charles P. Clever was a German immigrant and an influential businessman and trader, a mason, and the U.S. Marshal for New Mexico starting in 1857. Using Clever’s name, Abelbeck dug up the text for the fire company’s Act of Incorporation and a list of its initial participants.

She’s still working to match the other four men and thinks one may be Solomon Spiegelberg; the other seated fellow may be Charles Emil Wensche. Have a hint? Send it to Hannah.abelbeck@state.nm.us.

Meet Fred Harvey at the New Mexico History Museum

Posted on October 1, 2014 by admin

The more one sees of the world…the more he respects Fred Harvey. He is the Great American Caterer.

—William Allen White, 1897

Will Rogers noted that Fred Harvey “kept the West in food—and wives.” But the company’s Harvey Girls are by no means its only legacy. From the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway’s 1879 arrival in New Mexico to the 1970 demolition of Albuquerque’s Alvarado Hotel, the Fred Harvey name and its company’s influence have been felt across New Mexico, not to mention the American West. The company and its New Mexico establishments served as the stage on which people such as Mary Colter fashioned an “authentic” tourist experience through architecture and interior design, while Herman Schweizer helped drive the direction of Native American arts as an industry.

Setting the Standard: The Fred Harvey Company and its Legacy, a new section that joins the New Mexico History Museum’s main exhibit, Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now, tells those stories and more. Opening Sunday, Dec. 7, Setting the Standard uses rarely seen artifacts from the museum’s collection, images from the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives and loans from other museums and private collectors. Focusing on the rise of the Fred Harvey Company as a family business and events that transpired specifically in the Land of Enchantment, the tale will leave visitors with an understanding of how the Harvey experience resonates in our Southwest today. Continue reading →

USS New Mexico Gets a Second Course of Tiffany Plates

Posted on August 5, 2014 by admin

We were honored today with a visit by the executive officer and senior crew of the USS New Mexico–out of the deep, on dry land and in the desert that their nuclear submarine is named for. Among the reasons for the visit was to trade out two dessert plates from the New Mexico History Museum’s luscious 56-piece Tiffany silver service that have ridden on the boat for the last four years.

Made in 1918 by Tiffany & Co. for use aboard the submarine’s predecessor, the fabled USS New Mexico battleship, the set came to the museum in the 1960s after that boat was decommissioned and after seeing brief use aboard the USS Midway and USS Bon Homme Richard. Since 2010, the submarine has had two plates bearing finely etched drawings of New Mexico scenes, the Santa Fe Trail and Taos Pueblo. They’re just two of the reminders that New Mexicans have placed aboard the submarine, including extensive Southwest-style decor courtesy of the volunteer USS New Mexico Committee, Navy League.

“One of the keys (of the Tiffany plates) is having the link between the ship and the home state,” said LCDR Craig Litty (that’s him at the far left in the photo above). “It makes a connection to remind us of what we do all the time. We’re on a warship. It can be tough to remember what we’re working for. It’s one of the key things to keeping us grounded. Between these plates and what the committee sends us, it keeps us very close. This is my third attack submarine, and it has the best relationship with its home state.”

Continue reading →

World War I and New Mexico: A special remembrance

Posted on July 25, 2014 by admin

Armored truck and motorcycle in action, Pershing Mexican Expedition, New Mexico, 1916, by W.H. Horne. Palace of the Governors Photo Archives LS.1908.

After Pancho Villa’s March 9, 1916, attack on Columbus, NM, Gen. John J. Pershing launched a Punitive Expedition with one goal: Get Villa. Given his failure to do so, Pershing’s effort could easily be chalked up as a military failure. But its long-term impact was significant. The surge into Mexico provided valuable training for Pershing and for New Mexico troops who would all too soon enter World War I.

As centenary commemorations for “The Great War” begin across the globe, the History Museum’s interim director, Jon Hunner, will speak on “World War I and New Mexico” at noon on Wednesday, July 30. This free lecture will be in the Meem Community Room; enter through the museum’s Washington Avenue doors.

Hunner is a New Mexico State University professor of history on loan to the museum. His areas of expertise include 20^th-century New Mexico and the Manhattan Project.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo, along with his wife. A month later, Emperor Franz Joseph declared war on Serbia; Russia, Serbia’s ally, immediately mobilized its forces. By Aug. 1, Germany had declared war on Russia, and the dominoes began to fall. The United States entered the war on April 6, 1917. Armistice was achieved on “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918—today commemorated as Veteran’s Day.

What roles did New Mexico play in the conflict and what impact did the war have on our state? What was the Zimmerman telegram and how did it speed America’s entry into the war? Hunner will explore how events in distant lands affected the New Mexicans who served, including the many men who gave their lives, and how those events transformed the nation’s second-youngest state.

Who has the nation’s No. 1 Western museum? We do, we do!

Posted on July 24, 2014 by admin

Now landing in subscribers’ mailboxes, the September 2014 issue of True West magazine names the New Mexico History Museum as the nation’s best Western museum, “in recognition of their superior exhibitions and ability to reach all generations through their creativity in interpreting the West while fulfilling their institution’s mission.”

The honor follows the announcement that the museum won a national Award of Merit for Leadership in History from the American Association of State and Local History for its 2013–14 exhibit, Cowboys Real and Imagined.

“New Mexico History Museum’s dedication to excellence, and their mission of preserving and interpreting our great Western history for all generations, is inspiring,” said True West Executive Editor Bob Boze Bell. “They keep the Old West alive.”

Other honorees include the Buffalo Soldiers Museum in Houston, Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City, Kan., and the Autry National Center of the American West in Los Angeles. In a media release announcing the honor, the magazine noted the History Museum’s “extraordinary, award-winning exhibitions, such as Cowboys Real and Imagined, but [also] cutting-edge, creative exhibits like Toys and Games: A New Mexico Childhood [and] the long-term exhibit Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now.” The magazine article lauds the cowboy exhibit for its state-of-the-art quality and robust programming. “Best of all, the exhibit made cowboys—and history—interesting to today’s youth.”

“This is a fantastic recognition of the team at the N.M. History Museum and their hard work in preserving and interpreting our state’s unique heritage,” said Interim Director Jon Hunner. “From cowboys to Spanish colonial devotional art and from pinhole photography to the Native American Artisans Program under the Palace Portal, this museum takes joy in presenting exhibits and programs about New Mexico and the true west.”

Upon its opening in May 2009, the museum was named “one to watch” by the magazine. In this, its fifth-anniversary year, the museum has two major exhibits featuring treasures from its collections: Painting the Divine: Images of Mary in the New World and Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography.

Spur Award-winning writer Johnny D. Boggs selected the winners for True West’s annual award based on his extensive travels, research and firsthand experiences in visiting dozens of Western museums each year. True West magazine is in its 61st year of leading the way in presenting the true stories of Old West adventure, history, culture and preservation. For subscriptions and more information, visit http://www.twmag.com or call 888-687-1881.

Go Ask Alice

Posted on June 27, 2014 by admin

On Wednesday, June 25, the History Museum happily welcomed the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project and 29 participants for a 90-minute workshop that was, in a word, wonderful. Or perhaps it was frabjous, an appropriate word given the Lewis Carroll overtone the day took on.

Gary Glazner (at left), a Brooklyn-based poet with strong New Mexico ranching roots, directs the project, which helps people with memory illnesses, their caregivers and family members find a moment of respite through the literary arts. He’s brought the project to the museum before, but this was the first time he had the psychedelic images and cameras of Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography to work with.

Joined by Palace Press Director Tom Leech, Glazner began in the museum’s main lobby, leading participants through a museum-ish poem, calling out a line then encouraging them to repeat it. Then repeating it again. Then adding a rhythm section. Then encouraging a hip bump. Then a dance move. And laughter all the way.

The poem, “The Museum Heart,” is by Alberto Ríos, and it begins like this:

We, each of us, keep what we remember in our hearts.

We, all of us, keep what we remember in museums.

In this way, museums beat inside us. …

Then the group moved upstairs to the Poetics of Light exhibit. After a few exercises in the exhibit, participants gathered around Bethany de Forest’s Rosetvliders, an imagined landscape of impossible flowers and lighter-than-air butterflies:

Glazner asked folk what the painting looked like, felt like, smelled like, sounded like. A cacophany of answers followed. Honey. Oranges. Morning rain. Bzzzzz-bzzzzz-bzzzzz. One woman spied a rabbit and hopped up, scrambling around the group in imitation of a bunny. Another flapped her arms as elegantly as a ballet dancer. Alice in Wonderland came to one man’s mind.

Finally, Chimayo poet Michelle Holland, who had kept careful track of the answers, turned them into a call-and-repeat poem that ended with a lengthy (if slightly amateur) version of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” Here it is:

Go Ask Alice

Moving clouds

and sunshine

and joy

and a rabbit eating it, a rabbit running.

The colors make it real, like Alice in Wonderland –

go ask Alice, go ask Alice, go ask Alice B. Toklas,

“What does one pill make you?”

Where the flowers taste like cotton candy, oranges, and honey in a magical museum.

Where the flowers smell like whoa…! and rain and wet green morning and leaves,

and leaves wet as the rain clouds.

Hear a slight rustle, laughter, busy like bees. Bzzzz. Bzzzz. Whoosh. Whoosh. Flap. Flap. Bzzzz. Whoosh. Flap. Flap.

Feels warm, soft, and floaty.

Feels cushy. Shout, “Cushy!”

There’s no sense. There’s only nonsense.

Nonsense!

Whirling dervishes – a living community —

We could go forever and ever in them. Amen. Forever and ever. Forever. Halleluiah!

Later in the week, Glazner gathered with staffers and others involved in the arts as well as aging issues to plan a Dementia Arts Conference for Oct. 25 at the museum. (Stay tuned for frabjous details.) In the meantime, consider the woman who brought her father to the event and left beaming at the joy she had witnessed. “It was just wonderful,” she sighed, although, her father added, “It would help to have a fiddle.” To which we say: Callooh! Callay!

Pinhole Photographers, Unite!

Posted on April 30, 2014 by admin

When we decided to showcase some of the images and cameras in the museum’s Pinhole Resource Collection, we knew that thousands of visitors would become enchanted. Little did we know how the photographers themselves would react.

When Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography opened April 27, 30 photographers from around the world arrived in Santa Fe, eager to see their work included in the exhibition. And, it turns out, eager to meet one another. They met the evening before at a private reception generously hosted by Verve Gallery. And by the time the opening rolled around, their camaraderie had an old school reunion feeling to it.

Some of them purchased copies of the Museum of New Mexico Press book, Poetics of Light: Contemporary Pinhole Photography, then passed them around for signing almost as though they were yearbooks. Here’s astrophysicist Ed Fenimore signing someone’s copy:

And here’s some of the gang gathered in the museum lobby after shooting a group photograph (yeah, they took lots of photographs) in the Palace Courtyard:

Guest curators Eric Renner and Nancy Spencer founded the Pinhole Resource in San Lorenzo, NM, and donated its 6,000 photos to the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives in 2012. Upstairs, in the exhibit area, Renner (at right) greeted old friends and photographers:

And out in the Palace Courtyard, photographer Donald Lawrence sat on a chair surrounded by photo-developing chemicals, carefully working on a new negative the traditional way:

“I always thought of myself as a loner,” said Lawrence, who lives in Camloops, British Columbia, and whose underwater kayak camera is on display in the exhibit. “Being here shows me that I’m really part of a community.”

We’re especially grateful to all the other folks who showed up on Sunday, yet another part of our community, people who are just learning that they may want to be part of that Pinhole Photography Fraternity, too.

Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography is on display at the New Mexico History Museum through January 10, 2016, so there’s plenty of time to come and …. check out how a pinhole camera works:

…test a simple camera obscura device:

…and learn how camera obscuras work:

Why Did the Harley Cross the Road…?

Posted on March 31, 2014 by admin

…to get to the other museum.

Today, the New Mexico Museum of Art transferred ownership of its 1940 Harley-Davidson WLD Extra High Compression 45 Special Sport Solo to the New Mexico History Museum. Longtime visitors to MOA will remember the bike on display for years, a thing of beauty and exemplar of New Mexico’s open roads. But our sister museum needed space in its collections vault, and we saw a way to blend it with the “My New Mexico” theme in our main exhibition, Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now.

Eventually, it will join a broken-in-two car that juts from two walls in a lower-level theater. Short documentaries that rotate in the theater include one on Route 66, a road seemingly made for an open-throated, two-wheeled beast of a bike.

First, though, we had to get the Harley from their vault to our vault. That posed a number of problems. The engine hasn’t been started in years, so you can’t just fire it up and drive it over. The MOA folks could have loaded it onto a truck, but its bed didn’t reach our loading dock, where its delivery would have been nice, neat and behind-the-scenes. Instead, we went old-school: Their collections staff wheeled it across the street, in through our front doors, down two hallways, into a freight elevator, down another hallway and, finally, into our collections vault.

The original owner of the Harley is believed to be Chris Elliott Davis of Winston Salem, NC, who sold it in 1980 to Francis Harlow. “Frank” is a Los Alamos physicist, an artist, and a noted Native pottery collector and researcher. He specialized in studying the evolution of historical Pueblo pottery and wrote or co-wrote five books about it, including The Pottery of Zia Pueblo (2003), Historic Pottery of the Pueblo Indians, 1600-1880 (1990); and The Pottery of Santa Ana Pueblo (2005).

He moved to Los Alamos to work at the lab in the 1950s, when it was still a closed city. Maybe that explains part of the appeal of the bike. According to the booklet, Harlow, written by Jeanne Hassenzahl in 1975, Harlow wanted “a big, powerful, throaty sounding machine that really rumbled and sounded great.” In 2001, he donated it to the Museum of Art. It first delighted visitors in the 2001-02 exhibition Tourist Icons, Native American Kitsch, Camp and Fine Art at yet another one of our sister museums, the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. It went on exhibit at MOA in 2006.

For those who salivate for such details, here goes: The bike has a 3-speed transmission and a 45 cubic-inch flathead engine with aluminum heads. Its color is “clipper blue” with white striping. Customized elements include black leather saddle bags, black saddle and light bar. Enjoy the views:

Pinhole Photo Meets Poet Laureate

Posted on March 28, 2014 by admin

Opening April 27, the exhibit Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography took its name from the way light becomes an object of play when set between an object and a pinhole camera. The photos produced take what we think we know of the world and turn it upside-down, backward and more.

It seemed only natural to reach out to Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis to help us with events during the exhibition’s run. He agreed (see list of events at bottom), but went one better. Using Gregg D. Kemp‘s pinhole photograph, Jane Always Dreaded Flying Home, as his inspiration, Davis wrote a poem that the Palace Press is turning into a broadside.

Director Tom Leech decided to try a new technique, having Kemp’s photograph digitally printed on the paper, then applying Davis’ poem via traditional letterpress. “I’ve never seen this done before,” he said.

Here’s Leech feeding it into the press to apply the poem’s headline:

Studying the typography:

And holding the almost-finished product:

The broadside will be released on the exhibition’s opening day. Copies will sell for around $75.

For Leech, the project held a coincidental quirk: In 1974, he and Kemp owned Virginia Woodworks in Colorado Springs, where they made Appalachian dulcimers. The business didn’t last, but this photography (fittingly, a pinhole image) of the two of them way-back-when survived:

Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography events with Santa Fe Poet Laureate Jon Davis:

Friday, May 30, 6 pm, “Santa Fe Poets 5,” the fifth of six group poetry readings Davis is organizing as part of his tenure. Joining him in the History Museum Auditorium will be Chee Brossy, Joan Logghe, Carol Moldaw, Henry Shukman, and Farren Stanley. Free.

Sunday, June 1, 1 – 4 pm, “The Poetry of Light,” a writing workshop building on inspiration from Poetics of Light images. Open to high schoolers and older, the event is free, but reservations are recommended. Call 476-5096.

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