In the Museum of the Lost World

When we travel, many of us visit museums. Paris? See the Louvre. Florence? Uffizi. Berlin? Maybe the Pergamonmuseum.

Were there no museums, only the wealthy or powerful would ever see the grandest works of art, the mightiest inventions of the past or have the means to see artifacts of lost civilizations or the animals and plants that occupied the planet 200 million years ago.

There’s another tier of the museum world, so extensive and multifaceted that no human will ever list them all: small museums dedicated to local history, crafts, food, technologies, machinery, cultures, occupations and the natural world.

Almost everywhere there are people, there’s a museum commemorating a local artist’s birthplace, an event from history or a distinctive local trade or food.

Do you stop? Sometimes? Rarely? Never?

Put me in the “rarely” category. Recently The Counselor and I traveled 300 miles north of Los Angeles into the Owens Valley. In just a few hours we passed the Museum of Western Film History, the Southern Inyo Museum (both in Lone Pine), the Eastern California Museum (Independence), the Paiute-Shoshone Cultural Museum and the American Mule Museum (both in Bishop), to name a few.

No doubt they all contain things of interest and reflect well upon their communities and the staff, volunteers and patrons who support them. There’s simply not time to see everything.

The One We Saw

We visited one museum that intrigued us: the Laws Railroad Museum, four miles north of Bishop, California.

I’ll cover the “railroad” part of the museum in a later post. Our visit provoked some questions to consider.

A Railroad Town in the Gold Boom

Laws, California sprung up in about 1880. Gold mining was booming in the Eastern Sierra, and the Carson and Colorado Railroad opened a narrow gauge line to serve the area. The creation of the railroad depot attracted settlers and new businesses. They built houses, a hotel, pool hall, blacksmith shop, boarding houses, a post office, barber shop and warehouses. Farming took hold in the river valley, too.

If you know the history of California, you know that the gold gave out early in the 20th century. Then something more dire occurred. The City of Los Angeles acquired huge tracts of the Owens Valley and began routing the essential Owens River into aqueducts to feed the growing metropolis to the south. In the words of two historians,

Water development policies adopted by the City of Los Angeles after 1924 led ultimately to the destruction of irrigated agriculture, and the virtual depopulation of the Owens Valley.

The trains ran to Laws until 1960, although by then there was no town left, just the depot, a few other buildings and the rail yard.

Preserved

In the mid-1960s, local volunteers started preserving the area’s crumbling past. They collected not only a locomotive engine and rolling stock, but entire buildings: a school, a church, houses, mining works, and moved them to the site. They assembled a simulated village on 11 acres.

Simply preserving the architecture and way of life from an earlier era is impressive. But the museum is more: All of the buildings are PACKED WITH STUFF. One house contains a large collection of old glass bottles, cans and an entire room of whiskey decanters.

It’s obviously not a complete collection, because there was not one, single, solitary Elvis decanter. I assume the original owners hung onto those.

All the buildings — doctor’s and dentist’s offices, printing shop, post office, blacksmith shop, school, machine shop and other buildings are chock-full of items related to those occupations.

Even the grounds themselves are full of farming and mining equipment.

My rural background reaches back far enough that I can identify more rusty old mowers, reapers, planters, threshers, balers, tractors and other implements than you would ever want to see on any given day. But what’s this big wooden wheel for?

Walk into a large building nearby and see a complete gold stamping mill, with a similar wooden wheel driven by a belt.

Many of the items have good explanations and details. Nearly everything is interesting to look at until your brain overloads, stops processing any more input and it’s time to leave. Apparently everyone in the northern Owens Valley with a collection has sent it to Laws.

That includes antique musical instruments…

… An 1880s Pennyfarthing Bicycle:

The Piece de Resistance

If you persist, scanning through the ten thousand artifacts for long enough, you’ll find it in a collection of old telephones. There in remote Laws is the telephone specially made in a custom color in 1948 for the singer/actress Jeanette MacDonald’s Beverly Hills home.

Did she actually use that golden voice to talk to Nelson Eddy on that very instrument?

The Louvre may want it. The Hollywood Heritage Museum must pine for it. I assume they’ve made offers and been turned down. You’ll have to venture up Route 395 to Laws to see it.

How did it get there? I have no clue.

What are we to make of these hundreds of local museums, maintained and curated with passion and to the best of their staff’s resources? Is this merely stuff, or do the millions of items they hold preserve something worthwhile? There are living people who remember using some of the items in the Laws museum. Memory will disappear within a generation or two. Will this and other local institutions become the museums of homeless things, preserving a lost world about which few people care? Or are they as important a part of our human heritage as Etruscan tomb art or the Wright Flyer?

And shouldn’t the Louvre, really, acquire that telephone?

What do you think? Leave a comment.

Additional blog posts about the Laws Railroad Museum

 An article about the museum’s exhibit of an iconic symbol ofmining days, the 20 Mule Team borax wagons, at this link.

The railroad portion: 1909 steam locomotive, antique rolling stock, 1883 depot building, railyard with original water tower, etc.

My appreciation goes to the volunteers of the Laws Railroad Museum.

© Brad Nixon 2018. Header photograph © M. Vincent 2018, used by kind permission. Quotation from Judy Triem and Mitch Stone (July 7, 1997). “National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination: Inyo County Courthouse”