Seventy years ago, the U.S. Department of the Interior Museum opened its doors. It was the brainchild of Secretary Harold Ickes, who believed the Department of the Interior had an identity problem due in part to its name. Ickes’s goal for the museum was to educate and present the story of the department and to help the American taxpayer understand its important work.

To help start the museum, the Public Works Administration allotted $100,000 for the museum but required the Interior Department set aside half for staff salaries. In March 1935, Ickes appointed Carl Russell, from National Park Services’ museum division, to head the museum committee, charging him exhibit design, preparation, and installation. Russell gathered a staff of curators, model makers, artists, sculptors and preparators to begin work on the museum in mid-1935.

The construction in 1935 of a new building for the department provided available space for the museum Ickes had founded. The building’s architect set aside one entire wing on the first floor, 11,750 square feet, near the main entrance for the museum. However, the space, a long, narrow wing with low ceilings and several load-bearing columns, was more suitable for offices. To make the space functional, the museum staff used walls to divide it into galleries and alcoves. They also added cove lighting above the exhibit cases to make the gallery spaces feel lighter and more airy.

The staff also configured a floor plan that gave each of the department’s bureaus a gallery to display exhibits on its history and current projects. Museum curators worked with each bureau to develop these exhibit story lines, illustrating them with objects, photographs, maps, watercolors, drawings and interpretative panels. The museum staff also installed zinc silhouettes in some of the lighting covers to further illustrate the work and mission of the department.

Story in Miniature: the Museum’s Dioramas

After a review of the museum’s collections, the museum’s exhibit designers determined that dioramas would provide visually stimulating illustrations for the visitors. A diorama is a miniature group depicting an event or activity with the viewer looking through a window-like opening to view the scene.  Artists achieve depth and perspective in dioramas by directing special lighting through tilted glass and painting curved back walls that blend into three-dimensional objects.

Construction of the dioramas started in 1935 at the National Park Service Field Laboratory in Morristown, N.J., which employed the period’s most skilled diorama artists. Though numerous artists worked on each diorama, the principal artist was superintendent Ned J. Burns, a master in creating dioramas. Upon completing the dioramas, the field laboratory installed 11 large and numerous small dioramas in the museum in July 1937 to illustrate its exhibits.

The “Coal Mine Explosion” diorama was the first diorama to take its place in the museum’s galleries.  Ralph Lewis of the National Park Service oversaw the design for the Bureau of Mines exhibits. They illustrated the mine disasters that led to the formation of the Bureau of Mines’ work to develop safety equipment. The “Coal Mine Explosion” diorama depicts the heroic efforts of a recovery team to save workers who were trapped underground when a mine exploded. The designers of the diorama modeled it on the 1929 Kinloch Mine explosion in West Virginia. To ensure authenticity, they secured more than 40 photographs of the Kinloch Mine and the accident. Designers obtained the specifications of the recovery workers’ equipment and even gathered every detail of the police officer’s uniform, including a fabric sample. When Congress abolished the Bureau of Mines in March of 1996, the museum replaced the bureau’s exhibits with other exhibitions. However, the museum did retain one alcove of its original Bureau of Mines exhibits. There the mine diorama serves as a record of the defunct bureau and as a time capsule of the original museum exhibits from 1938.

To enhance the National Park Service exhibits, curators used small dioramas illustrating the uses of the parks. For the diorama “Winter Use of the National Parks,” Russell R. Fiore and Stuart Cuthbertson featured two skiers coming down a mountainside with Yosemite in the background. Fiore was an accomplished sculptor who had exhibited his works with the National Academy of Design Architectural League of New York and the Corcoran Art Gallery. He created many of the diorama figures and sculptures the museum featured in the exhibit cases.

The Museum’s Collections

The collections of the Interior Museum include more than 6,000 objects of art; photography; minerals; and human-culture, archaeological, and natural-history specimens.  The museum documents, preserves and manages these objects in ways to enhance their long-term availability.  The museum uses the collections to interpret the history and to promote understanding of the department and its activities. While doing so, it educates the public, as well as employees, on the rich and varied work of the department’s many bureaus.

Following the formation of the museum committee in 1935, Ickes ordered the first purchase for the collections in 1936 from Helen Gibson of San Francisco. The collection consisted of approximately 400 Native American artifacts and made up the majority of the museum’s exhibits for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The museum has lent items from the collection to numerous organizations to help further the understanding of Native American culture.  The museum made more purchases and received donations of collections in the following years, including donations from photographer Ansel Adams and the U.S. Congress.

Adams had a love of the outdoors, and it shows in his magnificent photography. Ickes hired Adams to photograph the National Parks, but the project ended abruptly with the U.S. entrance into World War II. Adams remained connected to the department and, due to this, had a special relationship with many of the secretaries of Interior during his lifetime. During his career, he experimented with photographic screens and only made 13 of them.  Ickes purchased one of Ansel’s screens, “Leaves, Mills College, Oakland, CA,” in the late 1930s for his office and later gave it to the museum for its collection.  In 1968, Adams presented the screen “Fresh Snow, Yosemite Valley, CA” to Secretary Stewart Udall as a gift to the department, making it a part of the museum’s collection as well.

The painter Thomas Moran accompanied the Powell survey of the Colorado River in 1873 and the Hayden’s survey of the Yellowstone region in 1871. Following those explorations, he painted “The Chasm of the Colorado” and “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.” In 1872, Moran’s “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” had such influence on the U.S. Congress that it inspired them to set aside land for the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone. Congress purchased both paintings, which show the grandeur and beauty of the West, from Moran and exhibited them in the U.S. Capitol. In 1950, Congress transferred the paintings to the Interior Department. They hung there until 1968 when the museum lent them to the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum Renwick Gallery where they are on exhibit today.

After three years of hard work, the museum opened on March 8, 1938, with 11 dioramas; 12 large wall maps; 100 models; and numerous paintings, transparencies, charts, and specimens in 95 exhibits. Ickes held a formal invitation-only opening party on the 89^th anniversary of the department. Senators, artist William Henry Jackson, top museum professionals, Interior Department officials and all of the National Park Service staff who worked on the museum attended. The museum opened to the public the next day and was an immediate success, with 3,000 to 4,000 people visiting the museum monthly.

The National Park Service staffed the museum and cared for the collection until 1939 when the department placed the museum under the management of the Office of the Secretary.  For the past 70 years, the bureaus have lent and donated hundreds of objects to the museum for exhibitions and collections. These pieces of history have helped the museum record and enhance the vital connections between the people, places, and events relevant to the department.

Through the years, the Interior Museum continued to be popular among visitors and remained open during World War II when many museums in Washington, D.C., had to close. Since its inception, the museum has continued to be a communicator to the public, telling the Interior Department’s story, past, present, and future.

In 1997, a departmental task force concluded that the Interior Museum was essential for preserving the history of the department and for interpreting its current activities. However, the task force felt that the focus should shift from bureau-specific galleries to exhibits on the department’s mission and the history of the building.  While the Interior Museum maintains many of the original exhibits, it has updated others to include the current goals and projects of the department.

Six years later, the National Business Center moved the Interior Museum under the management of the Department of the Interior University. Innovative programs and exhibitions, which the Chicago Tribune, Town and Country Magazine, C-SPAN, and others have covered, have characterized this chapter of the museum’s life. Its current exhibition, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: America Responds,” opened on Veterans Day and was featured on major broadcast and cable television news outlets.

Related Link:

U.S. Department of the Interior Museum

http://www.doi.gov/interiormuseum/