The Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) is a history museum in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the largest private heritage organization in Washington state, maintaining a collection of nearly four million artifacts, photographs, and archival materials primarily focusing on Seattle and the greater Puget Sound region. A portion of this collection (roughly 2% at any given time) is on display in the museum's galleries at the historic Naval Reserve Armory in Lake Union Park.[1]
The museum's keynote exhibits include: Boeing's first commercial plane, the 1919 Boeing B-1; the Petticoat Flag, a U.S. flag sewn by women during the 1856 Battle of Seattle; and the Rainier Brewing Company's 12-foot tall neon "R" sign. In addition to both permanent and temporary exhibits, MOHAI administers ongoing youth and adult programming, and regularly hosts public events in partnership with other community organizations, particularly within the South Lake Union neighborhood. MOHAI is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and is a Smithsonian affiliate museum.[2]
History
In 1911, Morgan and Emily Carkeek hosted the first annual Founder's Day party at their home, which was an invitation-only event where guests dressed in historic costumes and brought artifacts and documents related to early Seattle. An outcome of these parties was the establishment of the Seattle Historical Society in 1914, the membership of which was limited to white settlers and their descendants.[3]
The Seattle Historical Society lacked a building to house the museum. Several attempts to find a permanent location were abandoned because of challenging financial circumstances, especially during the Depression, and the fact that the original society members were aging and new members were not joining. The collection continued to grow, however. In 1945, Boeing offered $50,000 towards an aviation wing, and over the next five years, the Society procured a site in Montlake. During this time, the Society became a more public and civic-minded institution, opening up the Founder's Day event to community and service organizations. The new museum opened in 1952.[3]
Over the last 50 years, management practices of the museum and collections, membership, and the relationship to its immediate surroundings, have been problematic. Changes in the 1980s included developing new exhibits and reaching out to underrepresented communities, which were a shock to older staff and board members. During the 1990s the museum gradually recovered from these internal challenges, as well as financial ones, and began expanding educational and community outreach programs.[3]
The impending reconstruction of SR-520 forced MOHAI to move from the Montlake site. After exploring options to move near the Washington State Convention Center, MOHAI and the City of Seattle agreed to move MOHAI to the Naval Reserve Armory in what was soon to be Lake Union Park. At that time, the building was being managed by the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department and was in need of significant repairs to be usable as a public museum space. Through a $90 million capital campaign, MOHAI did a full historic restoration of the facility, uncovering both the original ceiling and floor and conducting massive safety, accessibility, and systems upgrades. The project also included centralizing MOHAI's library and collections departments in a warehouse in the Georgetown neighborhood. In June 2012 the museum closed its Montlake location. Six months later, on December 29, 2012, the museum held a public grand opening for its new home in South Lake Union.[4]
Galleries
True Northwest: The Seattle Journey
The "Changes" section of MOHAI's True Northwest exhibit
MOHAI's core exhibit rings most of the building's second floor and provides a chronological history of Seattle and its environs. The exhibit winds through a series of 22 different sections that each focus on a distinct event or era in Seattle history ranging from pre-Pioneer settlements up to the modern day. MOHAI Creative Director Ann Farrington, who previously worked on Seattle's Experience Music Project and the National Holocaust Museum, has said that it is, "not a timeline, but a series of stories strung like pearls" in order to reveal how Seattle's past, present, and future are interconnected.[5] Along with numerous artifacts and photographs, the exhibit incorporates a significant amount of interactive media that allow visitors to touch screens or play games that explore different parts of Seattle history and culture. The core exhibit also includes the Great Fire Theatre, a "Gilbert and Sullivan-style opera" that involves artifacts from the 1889 Great Seattle Fire singing the story of the event over a film of historic images, and the Joshua Green Foundation Theater which plays a 7-minute film about Seattle culture on two large screens.[6]
The first floor of the museum is an expansive open room named the Faye G. Allen Grand Atrium. Both the original floor and ceiling of the Naval Reserve Building are visible from the Grand Atrium. Hanging in the center of the space is the 1919 Boeing B-1, the first commercial plane built by Bill Boeing. The plane is displayed to illustrate a typical flight path onto Lake Union, where the plane took off and landed during its tenure. On the south end of the Grand Atrium is a three-story tall-grid filled with Seattle cultural icons, including the neon Rainier "R" sign, a clam costume from Seattle seafood chain Ivar's, and a stuffed cougar donated by Eddie Bauer, founder of the namesake clothing store. The north end of the Grand Atrium features a 64-foot-tall sculpture called Wawona by local artist John Grade. Wood and other materials for the sculpture were salvaged from the 1897 schooner Wawona, which was dismantled in 2009 due to a lack of funding for restoration.
Walker Special Exhibits Gallery
The Walker Gallery is MOHAI's main space for displaying temporary and traveling exhibits. It takes up the entire southern side of the museum's second floor. When the museum initially opened at Lake Union Park, the Walker Gallery showcased an exhibit about Seattle's relationship with film called Celluloid Seattle: A City at the Movies. In 2015, the Walker Gallery hosted American Spirits: The Rise & Fall of Prohibition travelling from the National Constitution Center.
Linda and Ted Johnson Family Community Gallery
Another temporary gallery that occupies the third floor space of the museum. Much smaller than the Walker Gallery, the space is designed "to promote community ownership and stewardship of MOHAI" by showcasing collaborative projects with community partners.[7] The first exhibit in the gallery was a partnership with leading Seattle arts group Arts Corps, that worked with Seattle high school students to produce poetry and spoken word related to photos from MOHAI's historic photographic collection.
McCurdy Family Maritime Gallery
A young visitor looks through the WWII-era TANG periscope in MOHAI's Maritime Gallery
On the top floor of the museum is a small gallery dedicated to Seattle's maritime history. The space was originally designed as a replica of a ship's bridge in order to train naval recruits during World War II and features a set of south facing windows overlooking Lake Union. One of the most popular artifacts in the gallery is a working World War II-era TANG periscope from a naval submarine which offers a 360-degree view of Lake Union and downtown Seattle. The gallery is curated by the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society which has maintained a close partnership with MOHAI since the early 1950s.
Bezos Center for Innovation
The museum opened a major museum addition on October 11, 2013 called the Bezos Center for Innovation. The project is funded by a $10 million gift from Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.[8] The project was designed by Seattle-based Olson Kundig Architects and occupies a portion of the museum's Grand Atrium.[9]
Education programs
The K-12 programming at MOHAI is designed to complement the permanent exhibition, "True Northwest: The Seattle Journey". Programs are designed to support teachers through meeting state curriculum standards, and offering professional development opportunities; use primary sources to promote critical thinking; present multiple perspectives to explore diverse experiences and histories that make up Seattle's story; make history relevant with personal connections; and create links across academic disciplines.
Onsite programs for students are designed to complement the permanent exhibition. Students use primary sources to explore Seattle's stories, gather evidence to crack history mysteries, and explore facts and myths about Seattle's past.
Outreach resources include themed trunks that include artifacts, audio/visual resources, and adaptable activities that are aligned to state curriculum standards. Themes range from Native American People of Washington State, to the Settlers of Washington State, to the War Years. Themed packets of visual resources include photographs and slides, background histories and activities. Themes include Early Recreation in Seattle, Changing Scenes of Downtown Seattle, and Women in Washington History. Finally, a reader's theater script, drawn from primary sources relating to the Gold Rush, comes with stage directions.
MOHAI also organizes professional development opportunities for teachers, to strengthen their understanding of Seattle's history, object-based learning, and curriculum standards.
Collections
MOHAI has around 4 million objects in the collection, including roughly 100,000 three dimensional artifacts, over 3 million photographs, and around 200,000 archival holdings. Collections focus on Seattle's early settlement (c.1850) through the present day, and concentrate on the stories and achievements of Seattle and King County residents. The three dimensional collection encompasses a range of items such as textiles, fine art, decorative arts, household objects, maritime equipment, early computers, vehicles and more. The museum also has a growing collection of oral histories from long-time Puget Sound residents.
Photograph collection
The most heavily used portion of MOHAI's holdings is the collection of approximately 3.75 million historic photographs, which is the largest aggregation of historic documentary photography in the region. Like the rest of MOHAI's collections, the photos are primarily focused on Seattle and King County, but includes strong coverage of other parts of Washington State as well as Alaska. One of the most extensive sets of photos is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection. Seattle's (now defunct) original newspaper donated an estimated 2 million photographs to MOHAI in three successive gifts from 1975 to 2012. The collection comprises both published and unpublished news photos taken throughout Western Washington from 1917 to 2009. Another major group of photos is the PEMCO Webster & Stevens Collection. Operating under the motto, "Anything. Anytime. Anywhere." Webster & Stevens was a major commercial photography studio that set up shop in Seattle in 1903. They had a range of important clients, most notably the Seattle Times, which used the studio for nearly all of its newspaper photographs for 23 years until it hired staff photographers. In 1983 PEMCO Insurance made a $50,000 gift to MOHAI, allowing it to purchase roughly 55,000 photos by Webster & Stevens, creating the PEMCO Webster & Stevens Collection. Other noteworthy MOHAI photograph collections include: The Milkie Studio Collection; The King County News Photo Collection; The Seattle Historical Society Collection; Alaska Bureau Photograph Albums; Anders Beer Wilse Photographs 1892-1913; Ferdinand Brady Photographic Postcards circa 1907-1920; Frederick and Nelson Records 1901-1991; H.W. McCurdy Collection on the Puget Sound Bridge & Dredging Co. 1900-1945; Lockheed Shipbuilding and Construction Company Photographs; Moran Brothers Company Collection 1893-1939; Josef Scaylea Collection; Cary Tolman Collection; Robert H. Miller Collection; Washington Dayshoot Collection.
Sophie Frye Bass Library
One hundred years' worth of city directories from Seattle and other King County cities are stored at MOHAI's Sophie Frye Bass Library.
Most of MOHAI's archival holdings—including manuscripts, photographs, maps, books, motion pictures, and printed ephemera—are housed in the museum's library. The library is named after Sophie Frye Bass (1866–1947), granddaughter of pioneers Arthur and Mary Denny, and author of two books on early life in early Seattle including Pig Tail Days in Old Seattle (Pub. 1937). Bass was a prolific collector of historical books and manuscripts, and in 1914 donated her entire library to MOHAI's predecessor, the Seattle Historical Society. The library also houses the collections of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society and the Black Heritage Society of Washington State. The library, located in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood, is open to the public by appointment.
The Lake Washington Ship Canal, which runs through the city of Seattle, connects the fresh water body of Lake Washington with the salt water inland sea of Puget Sound. The Hiram M. Chittenden Locks accommodate the approximately 20-foot (6.1 m) difference in water level between Lake Washington and the sound. The canal runs east–west and connects Union Bay, the Montlake Cut, Portage Bay, Lake Union, the Fremont Cut, Salmon Bay, and Shilshole Bay, which is part of the sound.
Lake Union is a freshwater lake located entirely within the city limits of Seattle, Washington, United States. It is a major part of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, which carries fresh water from the much larger Lake Washington on the east to Puget Sound on the west. The easternmost point of the lake is the Ship Canal Bridge, which carries Interstate 5 over the eastern arm of the lake and separates Lake Union from Portage Bay. Lake Union is the namesake of the neighborhoods located on three of its shores: Eastlake, Westlake and South Lake Union. Notable destinations on the lake include Lake Union Park, the Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI), and the Center for Wooden Boats on the southern shore and Gas Works Park on the northern shore.
Duwamish is a retired fireboat in the United States. She is the second oldest vessel designed to fight fires in the US, after Edward M. Cotter, in Buffalo, New York.
Montlake is a wealthy residential neighborhood in central Seattle, Washington. It is located along the Montlake Cut of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, bounded to the north by Portage Bay, to the east by the Washington Park Arboretum, and to the south and west by Interlaken Park. Capitol Hill is on its south and west sides, and the University of Washington campus lies across the Montlake Cut to the north. State Route 520 runs through the northern tip of Montlake, isolating four blocks from the rest of the neighborhood. The (unofficial) City Clerk's map of Montlake considers it to extend further west, past Interlaken Park, extending to Broadway Avenue E. and, between Lynn Street and State Route 520, all the way to Interstate 5.
The Museum of Flight is a private non-profit air and space museum in the Seattle metropolitan area. It is located at the southern end of King County International Airport in the city of Tukwila, immediately south of Seattle. It was established in 1965 and is fully accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. As the largest private air and space museum in the world, it also hosts large K–12 educational programs.
State Route 513 (SR 513) is a 3.35-mile-long (5.39 km) state highway in the U.S. state of Washington, located entirely within the city of Seattle in King County. The highway travels north as Montlake Boulevard from an interchange with SR 520 and over the Montlake Bridge to the University of Washington campus in the University District. SR 513 continues past University Village before it turns northeast onto Sand Point Way and ends at the entrance to Magnuson Park in the Sand Point neighborhood.
South Lake Union is a neighborhood in Seattle, Washington, so named because it is at the southern tip of Lake Union.
Lake Union Park is a 12-acre (4.9 ha) park located at the south end of Lake Union in Seattle, Washington in the South Lake Union neighborhood. The park is owned by the City of Seattle and operated by Seattle Parks and Recreation. The park property was gradually acquired by the City, and the final 5 acres (2.0 ha) were transferred from the United States Navy to the City of Seattle on July 1, 2000. After renovation, the current park space officially opened on September 25, 2010.
Wawona was an American three-masted, fore-and-aft schooner that sailed from 1897 to 1947 as a lumber carrier and fishing vessel based in Puget Sound. She was one of the last survivors of the sailing schooners in the West Coast lumber trade to San Francisco from Washington, Oregon, and Northern California.
The National Museum of the United States Navy, or U.S. Navy Museum for short, is the flagship museum of the United States Navy and is located in the former Breech Mechanism Shop of the old Naval Gun Factory on the grounds of the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., United States.
Cheshiahud and his family on Lake Union, Seattle, Washington in the 1880s are, along with Princess Angeline, among the few late-19th century Dkhw'Duw'Absh about whom a little is known. In the University of Washington (UW) Library image archives, he is called Chudups John or Lake Union John. His family were among the few of the Duwamish people who did not move from Seattle to the Port Madison Reservation or other reservations. They lived on Portage Bay, part of Lake Union, when a photo was taken around 1885. According to the Duwamish Tribe, Lake John had a cabin and potato patch at the foot of Shelby Street. A commemorative plaque of unknown reliability is said to exist at the eastern foot of Shelby. This land was given to him by Seattle pioneer David Denny or the property was purchased—see below. Photographer Orion O. Denny recorded Old Tom and Madeline, ca. 1904, further noted in the UW Library archives as Madeline and Old John, also known as Indian John or Cheshishon, who had a house on Portage Bay in the 1900s, south of what is now the UW campus although native people had been prohibited from residence in Seattle since the mid-1860s.
The Albany Institute of History & Art (AIHA) is a museum in Albany, New York, United States, "dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting and promoting interest in the history, art, and culture of Albany and the Upper Hudson Valley region". It is located on Washington Avenue in downtown Albany. Founded in 1791, it is among the oldest museums in the United States.
The Senator John Heinz History Center, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, is the largest history museum in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States. Named after U.S. Senator H. John Heinz III (1938–1991) from Pennsylvania, it is located in the Strip District of Pittsburgh.
Discovery Park of America is a museum and heritage park located just outside the boundary of Union City, Tennessee. The park sits on 50 acres (20 ha) of land off of Everett Boulevard, near U.S. Route 51 and the proposed Interstate 69. It features exhibits and activities on local history, nature, military history, art and science.
PEMCO Insurance is a personal-lines mutual insurance company based in Seattle, Washington that serves only Washington and Oregon residents.
The Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society (PSMHS) is located in Seattle, WA.
The Naval Reserve Armory is a building in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, United States. It is a large concrete structure influenced by the Moderne and Art Deco movements, which was built by the Works Progress Administration from 1941 to 1942. The main interior feature is a 133 x 100 ft drill hall which was used by the U.S. Naval Reserve to train thousands of young recruits for service in World War II. The building is noted for its association with mass mobilization during the war as well as its involvement with Depression-era work relief.
The Suquamish Museum preserves and displays relics and records related to the Suquamish Tribe, including artifacts from the Old Man House and the Baba'kwob site. It is located on the Port Madison Indian Reservation in Washington state and was founded in 1983. The museum currently occupies a facility opened in 2012.
Emily Inez Denny was a painter who drew scenes from Seattle's early history, along with landscapes of the Puget Sound region. Her parents were Seattle pioneers David Denny (1832-1903) and Louisa Boren Denny (1827-1916). Her parents came to Seattle from Cherry Grove, Illinois over the Oregon Trail. Emily had a sister, Abbie Denny Lindsley (1858-1915), and two brothers, D.T. Denny and Victor Denny.
The architecture of Seattle, Washington, the largest city in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S., features elements that predate the arrival of the area's first settlers of European ancestry in the mid-19th century, and has reflected and influenced numerous architectural styles over time. As of the early 21st century, a major construction boom continues to redefine the city's downtown area as well as neighborhoods such as Capitol Hill, Ballard and, perhaps most dramatically, South Lake Union.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
