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 Museum herbarium collection has significant regional holdings, with 8,000 specimens dating from the early part of the 20th century to the present. While most of the collections date from the 1920s - 1960s, it is an actively growing herbarium with over 3,000 vascular plant specimens added in the last ten years. The herbarium is a valuable component of the park's museum collections and is an essential tool for resource management: fire management, exotics programs, and vegetation management. It is also a valuable source of information to the scientific community about Yosemite's complex flora. Online access is available to the museum's herbarium courtesy of the Consortium of California Herbaria (choose "YM (Yosemite N.P. herbarium)" as the source). Access is granted to researchers by advance appointment; contact the park's registrar for details.
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. 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.
Research hours at the archives are Tuesdays, 1-4 pm; Wednesdays, 8 am to noon and 1 pm to 4:30 pm; and Thursdays, 8 am to noon. To set up an appointment, call 209/379-1283.
