The new Wood River Museum of History and Culture boasts a buffalo hide coat worn by Albert Griffith when he came to Ketchum in 1879. It also exhibits a colorful poncho worn by Juan Salamanca, who came to Sun Valley from Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1994, and went on to become a local schoolteacher and church leader.
The juxtaposition of the two shows that history is still being made in the Wood
River Valley.
“We’ve established a tribal room devoted to telling the stories of the Shoshone-Bannock past and present.” says Mary Tyson, director of the Center for Regional History at The Community Library, which oversees the museum. “We’re talking about immigration in a way that’s inclusive. We’re asking the question of everyone: What was your journey here? What is your history?”
The Wood River Museum opened in July 2023—an offshoot of the former Sun Valley Ski & Heritage Museum in Forest Service Park.
It was Carter Hedberg, director of philanthropy at The Community Library, who conceived of building the new museum in a building being developed by longtime library patron Greg Carr catty-corner from The Community Library.
“The library took over the management of the museum in 2014. The City of Ketchum charged very little rent, but the warehouse buildings were not meant for museums. We had to operate them with one staff member, there were no public bathrooms, they needed long overdue upgrades, and they were across town, unlike the Gold Mine and Gold Mine Consign, which are a stone’s throw from the library,” Tyson says.
It didn’t hurt, she added, that renovation at the library and the Hemingway House, which the library oversees, had just finished.
A Seattle-based design company that designs museums helped plan the 2,000-square-foot space, and library staff developed exhibits for it over a year-and-eight-month course. They catalogued and moved some 7,000 artifacts into storage space below the museum.
“The move increased the historic value of the artifacts we have because we’re better able to find, identify and research what we have,” Tyson says. “And now more people are seeing them.”
Whereas the emphasis was on ski history in the old museum, the new museum has expanded to include other aspects of the valley’s history, including the Sun Valley Music Festival, which offers nearly four weeks of admission-free concerts in summer and winter.
The LiDAR [Light Detecting and Ranging] map splashed across the wall of the entryway depicts the Wood River watershed. “It sets the stage, inviting you to open your mind, because you don’t know exactly what you’re looking at,” Tyson says.
The Cabinet of Wonders encourages visitors to pull pulleys and push buttons to discover what’s inside a cabinet or drawer. It can include anything from a hanging railroad lamp that lights up, emitting a train sound when handled, to a stereoscope viewer where visitors can view pictures as a three-dimensional experience.
“It piques your curiosity since you don’t know what you’re going to see until you open the cabinet. And it’s a way of sharing more of our collection since we’ll rotate things,” Tyson says.
Developing the museum so quickly was an epic achievement, said Hedberg: “Since we’re privately funded, we were able to raise the funds we needed. And how quickly the community has embraced it. We’ve had more than 20,000 visitors in the first nine months. The best year in our old location saw 4,000 visitors.”
Marcia Liebich, a history major at Elmira College, was a regular visitor to the old museum and now encourages friends and families to tour the new museum.
“They’ve done an amazing job,” she says. “There’s so much more from the archives now on display. And I love how kids can handle an object and explore it.”
Hedberg’s favorite exhibit is the Hemingway exhibit.
“I think it’s outstanding, and I’m thrilled we can showcase some of the artifacts from the Hemingway House that shine a light on his time in Idaho because, for the most part, people never think of Hemingway in Idaho. They think of him in Key West and Cuba,” he said. “I also love that we can tell a variety of stories, such as exploring how people got to Sun Valley. It isn’t just everyone from the 1880s, and that’s what makes our community so interesting.”
Get Your Hands Dirty
The Wood River Museum is very much a HANDS-ON experience. All the museum exhibits include interactive elements, and visitors are encouraged to write, type, talk and remember…because we are all a part of history! Visitors can type “One True Sentence” on Hemingway’s typewriter or write their own unique story of how they got to Sun Valley on a luggage tag or even have a picture taken in an authentic chair from one of Sun Valley’s first chairlifts. The Cabinet of Wonders is a real cabinet full of doors and drawers that visitors of all ages can open to discover treasures ranging from an antique phonograph to vintage skis, a telegraph key, sheep shears, and all manner of historical documents!