Celebrating 75 Years

Wind stirs the tall ponderosa pine trees, charging the air with scent. A quiet corner of Flagstaff between Schultz Creek and Rio de Flag was not so different three-quarters of a century ago, when a young artist from Philadelphia made it her special place, putting down her paintbrush every evening to watch the sunset splash its color onto the San Francisco Peaks.

Mary-Russell Ferrell was raised in Philadelphia's polite circles, educated to hold her own in elegant parlors. But in her early 20s, she fell in love with the Southwest, spending summers in bloomers or breeches, exploring mountainsides and Indian ruins with her hus-band Harold Colton, a zoology professor who taught at the University of Pennsylvania.

Most summers they lived in a tent among the pine trees, adopt-ing this wild country northwest of Flagstaff as their own. Here, on more than a hundred acres, Harold and Mary-Russell founded the Museum of Northern Arizona, an organization focusing on the people and environment of the Colorado Plateau.

The museum celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, continuing a tradition of discovery and passion for place that began with the Coltons and others like them. However, "museum" is entirely too tame a word to describe the Coltons' legacy. It was [FAR LEFT AND RIGHT] Dr. Harold Colton and his wife Mary-Russell Colton co-founded the Museum of Northern Arizona with a mission to explore and explain the Colorado Plateau and to encourage appreciation of its unique beauty and character. Mary-Russell, an artist from Pennsylvania, organized exhibitions of Indian potters' work, emphasizing the art she recognized in their utilitarian ceramics. Today the museum houses nearly 5 million objects in its anthropology, biology, fine arts and geology collections.

[INSET ABOVE LEFT] Since its inception, the museum has showcased Indian fine arts, like these Navajo rugs.

[ABOVE] The Babbitt Gallery exhibit, "Histories in Clay: 1800 Years of Native Ceramic Artistry," includes black-on-white Chaco vessels.

Atime when adventure claimed its own. In the late 1920s, Flagstaff's 5,000 resi-dents were justifiably proud of their com-munity. Though in many ways a frontier town, Flagstaff boasted a teacher's college (now Northern Arizona University), a forest experiment station and Lowell Observatory. Each summer locals watched, fuming, as “outlanders” stepped off Santa Fe Railway trains, vanished into the backcountry and returned “laden with loot that they had dug from the earth or bought from the Indians, to be shipped off to Eastern destinations,” according to anthropologist Watson Smith, who wrote about the museum's beginnings when it celebrated its golden anniversary. Many locals felt that northern Arizona's irre-placeable past was departing along with the “carpetbaggers.” The Coltons themselves collected over a decade of summers, but their genuine inter-est in the land made them stewards, not carpetbaggers. Their passion for ancient arti-facts began during a picnic, when their 2-year-old son, Ferrell, found a potsherd. After that, they dedicated their summers to sur-veying and mapping sites throughout the area. By the time they settled permanently in a stone bungalow northwest of town, Harold had already published five articles on Southwestern archaeology and helped to establish the Wupatki pueblos northeast of Flagstaff as a national monument.

His co-sponsor for that executive order was Flagstaff postal worker and archaeology buff, J.C. Clarke. The Coltons met him one sum-mer after traveling to Wupatki in “El Fordo,” a Model T truck outfitted for adventure with a canvas tent. The men wrote back and forth, sharing their wish to keep northern Arizona's Treasures within the state. In 1924, Clarke began display-ing artifacts in a corner of the Woman's Club on Aspen Avenue in downtown. The Coltons donated display cases for the collection.

In 1926, the Colton family relocated to Flagstaff, and community interest in the museum began to develop. Mary-Russell's letter to the editor of the Coconino Sun was a call to action: “Flagstaff has at last an opportunity to show the effete East that she has taste and vision.” Flagstaff took up the challenge. Bylaws for the North-ern Arizona Society of Science and Art were developed at the close of 1927. The following spring, the society chose board mem-bers, with Harold Colton as director. The board took over the museum's operations, beginning with a few specimens, some ref-erence books, a staff of two or three and an “anonymous” gift (clearly from the Coltons) of $2,500. In September 1928, the Museum of Northern Arizona opened officially. Dr. Byron Cummings, the dean of Arizona arch-aeology-quite the adventurer himself at age 68-was speaker.

The speech must have been inspiring. By the following spring, the museum's collection of donated artifacts had spread beyond a corner of the Woman's Club to encompass the entire building. The support was a mandate for the museum's goals: “to collect and preserve objects of art and scientific interest; to protect historic and prehistoric sites, works of art, scenic places, and wild life from needless destruction; to provide facilities for research, and to offer opportunities for aesthetic enjoyment.” As curator of art, Mary-Russell worked tirelessly to create one such opportunity, the museum's first Hopi Craftsman Exhibition in 1930. She traveled to the Mesas, encouraging artists to contribute work and convincing many to come to Flagstaff for live demonstrations. The first exhibition succeeded on several levels: It helped foster traditional Hopi arts and crafts, which were fast losing ground to manufactured items. It strengthened the relationship between the museum and the reservation. Much to the Coltons' relief, it also captivated a curious public. The show's popularity led to additional exhibitions in later years, focusing on Navajo, Zuni, Pai and Hispanic traditions.

PUEBLO I PUEBLO II PUEBLO I PUERLOIN

In the early decades of statehood, Arizona's prehistoric past was uncovered by venerable organizations such as the Smithsonian Institution, the National Geographic Society and Harvard University. In 1930, the museum joined the fray, eventually surveying and recording more than 10,000 sites. Summers were spent in the field, with the museum's white-and-blue flag fluttering above tent camps by day and archaeologists gathering around the campfire each night to compare notes.

Back in the museum's lab, Harold and assistant director Lynn Hargrave developed a system still in use today for identifying Southwestern pottery types. Harold later recognized the Sinagua Indians as a distinct local prehistoric culture. Hargrave's services and lab space were donated by the museum to assist the work of astronomer A.E. Douglas and of Emil Haury, who would eventually become one of Arizona's most important archaeologists. Their work led to a master tree-ring chronology for the ancestral Puebloan world.

One of the institution's first scientists, Lionel F. Brady, known as "Major," was a schoolmaster and a friend of the Charles Darwin family. While wandering at Sunset Crater northeast of Flagstaff, Brady found potsherds that eventually proved people lived at the crater before, during and after its eruption, adapting to the changing environment. (Ironically, the discovery might not have been made at all if not for the efforts of Harold and other concerned locals who prevented a movie company from dynamiting the crater in the late 1920s for a scene in a film.) Major Brady also invented gadgets and gear to make research trips easier, including a sun-based compass for use near magnetic anomalies. His interests expanded to

paleontology when he led the expedition that uncovered Arizona's first Pleistocene sloth skeleton, Paramylodon harlani, affectionately dubbed “Owen.” Brady meticulously reconstructed Owen in the museum's annex, a storefront in the Monte Vista Hotel, to the fascinated interest of those who passed by the plate-glass window where they could see the Major at work, his everpresent pipe dangling from his mouth.

The museum, on the verge of outgrowing the Woman's Club and annex, began the search for a new location. Mary-Russell donated 29 acres of land across Fort Valley Road from the Colton home, and Harold funded construction. The new exhibit hall opened to the public in May 1936. Its lichencovered malpais stone and pine timbers harmonized with the surrounding ponderosa forest. The hall forms the heart of the present museum complex, 3 miles northwest of downtown Flagstaff along the Rio de Flag. In less than a decade, the museum had grown beyond a few artifacts donated by local citizens to an influential institution of science and art.

Then came World War II and, with it, the end of the Depression-era relief projects that had provided extra hands for fieldwork and construction. Most of the museum's programs, including the annual Hopi show, were suspended until after the war. The remaining four employees worked in back rooms wearing coats and galoshes in order to conserve heat. One affected program was the Hopi Silver Project. In 1938, Mary-Russell had suggested that Hopi silversmiths try using traditional designs seen in pottery and basketry. The idea didn't take off until returning Hopi war veterans adopted the overlay style. The new style and bold designs were a huge hit at the 1949 Hopi Craftsman Exhibition.

The Coltons reduced their duties during the 1950s, though they continued to donate land, and the museum continued to expand its activities and structure. One new exhibit was a replica kiva built to display murals from the Hopi village of Awatovi, which was abandoned after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. The murals had been excavated by Harvard University in the 1930s and returned to northern Arizona.

Bridging the past and the future, the centuries-old kiva murals inspired one of the museum's most innovative exhibits, a media-based interactive interpretation of a modern mural by artists Michael Kabotie and Delbridge Honanie. A related traveling exhibit called “The Magic of the Painted Room” will bring this ancient tradition of the Colorado Plateau to the world in upcoming years.

The museum's “reinvigorated” paleontology program continues the tradition of fieldwork. Recently, museum paleontologists discovered a therizinosaur (“scythe dinosaur”) near Big Water, Utah, one of the first found in North America. This birdlike creature is named for the long, sicklelike claws on its front feet, though weighing in at close to 2,000 pounds, the therizinosaur probably never took flight. As scientists continue to work on the animal's fossilized skeleton, the museum will display other recent finds, including sea turtles, a giant ray and plesiosaurs, fierce predators of the inland sea that covered the Colorado Plateau during the Cretaceous period 90 million years ago. Future plans include remodeling the main entrance of the museum. The building's historic architecture will be preserved, along with the forested setting that Mary-Russell loved so well. The Coltons' nearby residence, called a “showplace of the West” when it was built in 1929, is available for retreats and special events.

Summertime heritage programs feature artwork, traditional dances and live demonstrations, expanding on the legacy of the first craft exhibits. From May through September, activities spill onto the museum's flagstone courtyard and sometimes beyond. Last year, a Hopi woman guided a group of visitors on a botanical walk through the rocky canyon of Rio de Flag, pausing to explain how plants are used for food, dye and medicine.

Exploration, discovery and learning how people adapted to place-all cherished museum traditions continue on museumguided ventures that include hiking, backpacking, river rafting, kayaking, camping, biking and driving tours. Participants experience firsthand the natural beauty and cultures of the Colorado Plateau, guided by scientists, writers and artists who share a passion for place that inspires others.

In the inaugural issue of Plateau Journal, the museum's membership publication, Edward Abbey, the late author and environmental activist, wrote, “Any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet. He must possess the ability to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.” The Coltons certainly would have been pleased. Today their portraits hang near the museum's entry. Harold looks scholarly, Mary-Russell elegantly casual. But with a little imagination, you can envision them camped out in the surrounding forest, Harold's lanky frame stooped to study a potsherd, Mary-Russell in flannel shirt and bloomers with sketchpad in hand.

Their spirit of adventure survives through the Museum of Northern Arizona's fascinating halls and beyond.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Museum of Northern Arizona is located 3 miles north of downtown Flagstaff on U.S. Route 180. It is open daily, 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. Admission is $5 for adults and $2 for children ages 7 to 17.

Permanent exhibits focus on the land and people of the Colorado Plateau region. Heritage programs featuring native art and live demonstrations take place May through September.

Educational workshops include handson activities for all ages. The museum leads a wide range of guided outdoor tours, from river rafting to auto trips. Customized tours are available.

For the latest information on educational programs, trips and current exhibits, phone (928) 774-5213 or visit the museum's Web site, www.musnaz.org.

DISCOVERING THE MAGIC OF