The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Preserving small
town history
On a warm September day, Shelley DeGolyer hiked to the top of Red Lady; she hadn’t been up there since she moved to Crested Butte 11 years before. She hiked the ridge to the north, and on her way back down, she took a break at the false summit. She’d run into another hiker there on the way up, and it had been such a great view of town and the valley.
That’s when she caught sight of something small, out of the corner of her eye. Maybe the other hiker’s wallet. But it was an old tobacco tin, rough around the edges and the deep brownish red that comes with age and rust.
The lid was rusted on tight, but Shelley loves history and the promise of old things. She opened it, and the latch broke off in her hand. Inside were several papers, folded into fourths and weathered with age.
“I’m going, ‘Please have a year, please have a year,’” Shelley says, and the papers did: 1939. “As soon as I see that, I fold them back up and stuff them back in and go running down [the mountain].”
Peering into the past
Some hikers might have kept the tin, a treasure to display in their home. But Shelley went straight to Crested Butte Heritage Museum where she pored over the papers with museum exhibit and collections manager Brooke Murphy, staff member Barbara Mason and museum director Glo Cunningham.
The page on the outside was the most degraded, red with rust from the tin. Toward the middle, the pages were covered in faded yellow and orange splotches. But the group could still make out the details.
Each page was pulled from a day planner and written on in pencil—fortuitous, Murphy says, because pen bleeds. After 70 years, pen might have been illegible. Because pencil lasts they could still make out dates—September 30, 1939, October 1, 1939 and August 8, 1940—and lists of names.
Many of the names were familiar, long-time Crested Butte families. A couple of the men were from the country Trinidad, where a Crested Butte resident had spent some time. And according to the notes, the group’s first visit to Red Lady was an “International Geographic Expedition… under the auspices of the International Surveying Institute for the study and finding of precious minerals.” The second? “Just for fun.”
continued from page 1
The author of the notes had also drawn a crude map to show his location, showing the position of town and Red Lady, and even the location where they left the tin—an X that corresponded exactly to where Shelley was standing when she found it more than 70 years later.
That’s when the questions began: Was there really an international expedition? Or was it a group of young men playing a joke? Do their names correspond to anything else in the museum’s archives or database? And what is the best way to conserve the tin and papers?
When the past meets the present
Exposure to air and light—even the act of taking the papers out of the tin—accelerates decomposition. It’s the Catch-22 of piecing together the valley’s history: the mere act of finding an artifact changes its nature, like the latch on the tobacco tin breaking when Shelley opened it.
Learning what a piece says about Crested Butte has to be balanced with keeping it intact, which can mean preserving it (cleaning and storing it in a safe place) or conserving it (taking steps to prevent further degradation). The papers that Shelley found will take special attention.
“They are in a vulnerable state. Literally, the paper is coming apart,” Murphy says. Another couple of years on Red Lady, and they might have disintegrated completely.
Timing tends to work that way when it comes to finding historic artifacts. Many people, like museum staff member Mason, feel they are drawn to the item in way they can’t explain—it finds them more than they find it.
“Energy always exists. It’s not created or destroyed. It could be that when Shelley sat down where they sat, the energy from their conversation was still there,” Mason says. It’s an idea that resonates with Shelley.
“In a weird way, it was calling me up there. The day before I was like, do I really want to go up this way? And it was like, no, something was drawing me up there and then there it was on the way down,” she says.
The other hiker sat feet away and didn’t see it. How many others had been there and not seen it?
Finding the story
Learning what the tin says about our town is no small task. It’s one part of a larger picture, and Murphy starts by gathering as much information as she can. If there were a company’s name on the tobacco tin, she might look that up. In this case, she will cross-reference the names on the paper with other historical documents. But first, the paper needs to be conserved and small-town museums don’t necessarily have paper conservationists on hand—or the budgets.
Murphy will look to Western State College and other professionals in the community to see what resources are available. She can also check with the Colorado-Wyoming Association of Museums to see if there are upcoming workshops or if professionals will be traveling through the area any time soon.
In that case, she could set up a training for museum staff and volunteers. The immediate goal is to conserve Shelley’s find, but the larger goal is to do it in a way that will help the museum conserve other parts of its collection. A shelf next to Murphy’s desk is full of historical pieces: store ledgers, rusted bottle openers and wrenches, a mouse toy and railroad spikes that date back to the mining era—even an old lunch box.
Together, they tell us what life used to be like in Crested Butte. But their preservation has to be balanced with funding sources, like donations or grants, and managing the collection—rotating items in and out of the museum in a way that limits their exposure to light and air but continues to tell new and relevant stories about the way our town once lived.
Telling the story
There is a certain mystique to finding something old that comes from standing on the exact spot where someone stood 70 years before, imagining what they might have been doing there. It’s what drove Shelley to give the items to the museum.
“It felt like the right thing to do and yet it was one of these things that, man, what a cool idea to start a little legend,” Shelley says.
It’s the same feeling that drives people to see the birthplace of mountain biking or learn about the town where their grandparents mined. The story of a place, Murphy says, is important whether you have long-time roots there or not.
“A lot of us come from other places, and we bring with us the history of the community we grew up in. But when we choose to live where we didn’t grow up it’s good to recognize that people have done this before,” Murphy says.
Miners, ranchers, skiers and mountain bikers all figured out how to make a life in a small mountain town. They stayed, even when it was hard, and their history, Murphy says, is part of the value of this place. It created all the things about Crested Butte that inspire people to move here. The goal, then, is to use items like Shelley’s tin and papers to tell the community stories about that past.
“We’re products of our past, but we’re also makers of history. When we move here, as history makers, we have to understand the story of the place,” Murphy says.
