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Collections |
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Development of the Collections Please click on the photos to view larger. |
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Since its founding in 1879, the Colorado Historical Society has
actively gathered the material evidence of the state's past through
donation, purchase, exchange, and field collecting. Its collection
of archaeological materials began with the purchase in 1893 of 4,500
artifacts from Mesa Verde. The collection has since grown to become
one of the most extensive in the world on Northern Anasazi pottery,
lithic and organic artifacts. An initiative begun in 1986 to collect
all of the newspapers published in the state has allowed the Society
to become the largest and most complete depository of Colorado newspapers
in the region, with a microfilm collection in excess of 25,000 reels.
During the early years of the twentieth century, the Society also
added significant artifact collections documenting the military
history of the state. Society curators acquired cultural artifacts
from reservations all over the West, including the largest known
collection of Ute Indian artifacts in the state. From the 1920s
through the 1940s, Society historians and curators traveled extensively
to save the papers of early Colorado settlers. This effort included
the acquisition of a significant portion of the estate of Colorado's
most famous mining king, H.A.W. Tabor, as well as material on his
second wife, Baby Doe. During the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration funded Society research on Colorado's cities and towns, oral histories on Colorado counties, and the construction of over fifty dioramas depicting Indian life, the fur trade, mining, and transportation. The Society later expanded its collecting mission to include acquisition of historic properties across the state, the forerunner of the Society's current regional museum system. An important project begun in the 1940s was the Western Range Cattle Industry Survey, conducted in collaboration with the Library of Congress and resulting in over 200 indexed rolls of microfilm as well as primary source material detailing the history of ranching throughout the West. Twenty years later the Society established the Western History Business Resource Center, a collection of over 1,300 manuscript collections documenting the economic and commercial life of the state. In the 1970s and 1980s, several new and important acquisitions were added to the Society's collections, including the mining records of the Juanita Coal and Coke Company, a number of weavings and other textile materials from the Rio Grande region, and thousands of photographic portraits of both Colorado and New Mexico families taken in the studio of photographer O. E. Aultman. Recent collaborations have continued to build on the Society's collections; foremost among these is the 10th Mountain Division Resource Center, a collection that examines the role of the famed mountaineering ski troops of World War II who trained at Camp Hale near Leadville, Colorado. |
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