A collection of baskets by American Indian women is housed in the Yosemite Museum. Lucy Telles, pictured, demonstrated basket-making to visitors from 1930 until her death in 1955.
Yosemite’s resources are captured within a flourishing museum collection that protects more than 4 million items, including John Muir’s tin cup, Thomas Hill’s oil paintings, and 100,000 historic park photographs. The 1922 donation of an Indian basket collection helped inspire the park to build a museum in Yosemite Valley that opened in 1926.
The Yosemite Museum has the honor of being the first museum built as a museum in the National Park Service. The collection is home to more than a million historic records and another million archeological artifacts. View the current Views & Visitors: The Yosemite Experience in the Early 20th Century. (View highlights of past exhibits, such as the 2011 Yosemite Renaissance XXVI and the 2010 Views & Visitors exhibit about the 19th century.)
The Yosemite Research Library, maintained by the museum, is a research resource with some 10,000 books relevant to Yosemite, as well as photographs and articles. The library is open to the public; contact the park's librarian for details.
The Yosemite Archives, located in El Portal, contains National Park Service records, personal papers, and manuscript collections. It also includes the oral history collection. For more information about available collections, research, and access, download the archives repository guide [1.3 MB PDF], which includes research request forms. Acquired by Yosemite in December 2008, the Joseph Dixon collection has a finding aid [760 kb PDF] that outlines how onsite visitors can peruse the Dixon collection using a computer database.
