It's been three years since our flood occurred and destroyed the
infrastructure on site at Scotty's Castle and so we have been working
towards planning for the future and one of the things that we realized
while we were conducting this planning was that we would have to move the
collections for a number of reasons and these included complications due to the
loss of our water system the loss of electricity and the loss of a good
number of staff who helped care for this collection.
Quite a bit of work has been done on-site to prepare for the repair of our
infrastructure and our buildings and to care for our museum collections.
We're planning on improvements from what the castle was like before the flood but
we're also looking at keeping the historic nature of the collection intact
and the buildings and the site of course.
Our collections are being moved as we film and we are approximately two months
into that move. The collections will be moved to a professional state-of-the-art
museum storage facility where they will be very well cared for and still
accessible to the curation division to allow us to remove objects for
conservation projects that we will be undertaking in the next three years
while the castle is closed.
This flood, this move has allowed us to actually see
all of our collections out of storage out of cupboards and to document it in
addition to describing it a lot of it had never been described so that
information will be available to research.
These curtains have been in storage for years and they're really quite lovely
they're from the lower music room they were taken off exhibit a couple decades
ago actually mainly because of the deterioration so you can see along here
how the fabric is pulled away from the binding and there was an attempt at
conservation at some point this is a relatively modern fabric and it was
unsuccessful so the curtains were put into storage this is one of the things
that we're hoping to remedy while the castle is closed down we're hoping to
have a lot of conservation work done on things like curtains that are severely
damaged so that we can put them back in the rooms they were originally intended
to be in and for those curtains that are too damaged we're hoping to have them reproduced.
In addition to conservation projects that will be
undertaken for museum collections we're also going to do some work on the
buildings and this is an example of problems that we're seeing in the building
this one is because water intrusion some of it through this door some of it
through the wall itself and we'll be repairing areas like this. We will also
be putting in door sweeps at the tops of the doors and down through the sides and
at the bottom. This will help with rodent control but also with controlling
abrasive dusts which are coming into the building.
So another area that we're working on in the castle is the organ pipe room.
Our work during this time when Scotty's is shut down is taking care of things
like deferred maintenance projects we wouldn't have time to do on our short
service visits we're now being able to do some major adjustments to the console
and a few reed pipes like the tuba and the trumpet that have been dirty and don't
hold tuned as well we're able to take them back and clean them up and get them
ready for another 30 or more years of service.
The tone of these is is produced
very much like an orchestral flute there's an opening although in this
instance it's a rectangle and the air enters the pipe at the bottom blows
across the opening and create, sets up an oscillation very much like going over
the end of a coke bottle if you remember old-fashioned coke bottles.
That's what you get there.
That's quite a ring. There's a wooden one it's just made out of wood
but it has exactly the same process the air enters at the bottom and blows
across this opening.
But quite a different tone.
This work is being funded
by private donations from the Death Valley Natural History Association to
which we're very grateful they support not only our maintenance work here but
also organ recitals and just generally keeping the organ going and
then good condition so many visitors can enjoy it each year.
It's not just a house in the desert it's everything that went into building
this place and the people who went into building it in addition to the people
who lived here. There are so many stories that can be told from this, this building
this site. There's stories of of the miners who came through here of the
railway that came to Bonny Claire. There are stories here of the Depression and
the people who came here to work because they couldn't find work elsewhere and
the people who lived in the area the Native Americans the Timbisha-Shoshone
and the Paiute who came and lived on site and worked here. There are a lot of
stories that can be told here that are not perhaps unique to Scotty's Castle but
when they're brought all together they make for a very important story of our history.