Note: This post ran as a Presidential Column in the Fall 2021 issue of the Mining History News.

Between a book project I’ve been working on and our excellent MHA meeting in Elko last June, there’s been a question I’ve been wrestling with a lot: how do we save and interpret mining history? What “stuff” should be saved so future generations of historians and the interested public can learn? These are remarkably difficult questions.

Think about your own route to engagement with mining history. Chances are good that, somewhere along the way, you learned from surviving artifacts. Maybe you saw a ghost town, or some abandoned equipment in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps you saw a mining display in a museum, or in a public park. Or maybe you witnessed a working mine transform into a closed one, and you pondered what would happen next.

Saving mining history takes a variety of forms, such as capturing stories, taking photographs, and preserving documents, but in this column, I want to focus on the “stuff” itself. Material objects from the past have an immediacy that is (or can be) profound. This “thing” witnessed or played a part in the lives of people now gone forever. What can it tell us? Think of some of America’s great historical treasures, such as the desk where the Declaration of Independence was written, or Lincoln’s top hat from the night he was assassinated, or – in a more mining history vein – the very nugget discovered in 1848 that kicked off the California Gold Rush. Being near any of them brings you somehow nearer to history. (All of these treasures are held for the public by the Smithsonian, by the way.) The power of objects to convey history works at less-grandiose scales as well. I feel a profound connection to my late father each time I use his Craftsman socket wrench or Phillip screwdriver. Those objects convey history – family history, but history nonetheless – to me.

So then, what objects should be saved to convey mining history to the future? Museum professionals well understand some fundamental truths about telling history with objects. One is that you cannot save everything. No budget is large enough, no storage is vast enough. A second truth is that some objects can tell better stories than others, or, to put it slightly differently, different objects support different stories. The realities of collecting, including size, space, budget, and availability, can determine what objects can be saved – and thus influence the stories that historians can tell and from which audiences can learn. If John Sutter had immediately melted down the nugget in 1848, we couldn’t stand next to it in a museum today and marvel what it must have been like for Marshall to see it glittering in the millrace.

And sometimes objects and collections can actually illustrate more stories than perhaps their collectors originally intended. A great example of this is the collection of mining lamps in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. This lamp collection, in total, is probably the largest in the world, consisting of thousands of lamps. The first of them were bought new in the 1880s, to help illustrate a collection of coal and mineral specimens shown by the museum at an exhibition in 1884 in New Orleans. Curators soon added to the collection, likely because they realized how well it fit their interests: lamps didn’t take up much room in storage, they were generally cheap to procure, and there were enough variations in type that they might be useful to illustrate technological change over time. Through the 20th century, curators continued to add to the lamp collection, including a donation from Mrs. Grant Wheat, the widow of the inventor of electric mining lamps, who was himself a tremendous collector. Today, a researcher looking to trace design variations in mining lamps would have a myriad of important examples, thanks to these efforts of more than a century.

But sometimes these same objects can help tell historical stories that go beyond technical changes in lighting design. Curators have considered using a mule-mounted mine lamp (purchased by the museum in 1884) in a modern exhibit to help discuss how 19th century workers labored alongside animals in industrial firms, and indeed, supporting documents show how the companies valued the lives of their mules more than the lives of their miners. The mule lamp helps bring these stories to life. Another lamp in the collection – a Baby Wolf safety lamp – is interesting for its design, but it becomes a far more compelling artifact when paired with its owner’s story about using the lamp during a mine rescue in the 1920s.[fn1]

So that brings me to a question for you to ponder: what stuff should we save for mining history? Anyone who has been to multiple MHA conferences has seen plenty of mining museums. What were the most compelling objects you’ve seen there? What stories can they tell? What things have you not seen in museums? How might those missing objects be represented or collected in the future? What do museums have enough of, perhaps because it doesn’t seem to say much? (I’ve got one of those: drill steel from power drills.) And perhaps we might even make the question personal: what object might you choose to represent your life, or your career?

Museum professionals have done amazing work saving and interpreting the artifacts and exhibits we’ve seen on countless tours, but our field of mining history will be stronger if we play our part, today, in ensuring that important and meaningful objects get saved for future generations to learn from.

Eric Nystrom, MHA President

^[fn1]: See Eric Nystrom, “In the Aftermath of Tragedy: Herschel Wence and the 1925 City Mine Disaster, Sullivan Co., Indiana,” Mining History Journal 21 (2014): 22-29, http://mininghistoryassociation.org/Journal/MHJ-v21-2014-Nystrom.pdf

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