NHS digital e-newsletter - mid April 2020
Your Nevada State Museums’ staff and volunteers support Governor’s Sisolak’s
call to “Stay Home for Nevada” and are closed until further notice. For research questions, please contact the museum staff listed on the website.

Be sure to follow all Nevada State Museums on Facebook and share in fun
and informative Nevada history postings and on their websites.
Photo, two women wearing masks during the Spanish Flu outbreak, 1918.
Sharing your History with COVID-19
The Nevada Historical Society is here to support you & our community. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads, we see people, news reporters, and government leaders turn to history and public institutions to consult records, photos,oral histories, journals—the historic record—for guidance.

So we’re asking you: what stories of Nevada’s from the past or present are giving you courage? How are you spending your days in this strange new “normal?” What have you learned about yourself, your friends, and your family that gives you strength amidst chaos?

Please, send us a letter or email to add to the historical record, so future generations of Nevadans will know what these days were really like. Our mail is being opened once a week, and while your message won’t be read as quickly as it once would have been, your letter will be waiting for you in the NHS Research Library collection.

Thank you to everyone who sent in their COVID-19 stories- they are inspirational and thought-provoking. You can find a selection on our website, and we will continue to update it. The topics vary from courts hearing criminal cases, to Passover celebrations, to tackling daily chores. Keep the stories coming, this is history in the making--and you are making it!

Here is a link to our online website form to make sharing your history with COVID-19 even easier.

Photo, Eight children standing on main street, Jungo, Nevada, 1915.

More trivia will be posted on our Facebook page. You can find the answers on our website, under the Online Collections page.
Nevada History Trivia
What movie had two premieres' in April 1940? The movie is set in Nevada but filming was in California and parts of Nevada?

Answer - Virginia City

The first movie premiere was held at Piper's Opera house where Errol Flynn helped run an auction to raise funds for the opera house.

The second movie premiere was held in Reno where the historic pose of actors under the Reno Arch.
Note from the Director
Happy Spring everyone,

I hope this letter finds you all well, healthy, and working on all the projects that get bumped to end of your “To Do” list.

The NHS team is doing our part to stop the spread the of virus. Staff work at the NHS and from home on alternate days, and our dedicated docents are sheltering in place while conducting virtual meetings. We are continuing to answer research and photography requests and working to get more information for public access on our website and PastPerfect online.

We follow Governor Sisolak’s guidance and directives on when we will return to work, open to the public, and trim budgets. This last directive to trim budgets has hit all Nevadans, and the NHS is no exception. We have always been a lean and fit operation, so our main budget cuts will be to defer hiring vacant positions.

What this means for the NHS, is we will be relying even more on generous donations of time and money from our supporters. In each of the last 3 years our docents and volunteers have donated over 10,000 hours of time to the NHS—this is equal to 5 full-time positions. We simply could not accomplish all the “back of the house” work that makes our collections accessible or offer the wide variety of educational programming without their help!

Many of you have supported us with tax-deductible material donations: printers, ink, computers, shelving, books, museum cabinets, and more. We are working to augment our donor base and are in the process of creating a Friends of the Nevada Historical Society 501 (c) 3. This will allow us to pursue new grants and funding from endowments.

We need your financial support even more! We do rely on cash donations for our public programming and other vital operations. Because of the generous donation of 2.1 million dollars from the Tacchino Trust in 2016—the largest donation made to any of the 7 state museums—we have been able to provide expanded public programming, hire project-specific experts, and purchase an historically important postcard collection.

The NHS Tacchino bequest enables us to realize our dream for larger and centrally located facility downtown. This needed dream is almost a reality—due to the COVID-19 pandemic we had to move the signing of the papers from March to June 2020. While we have the funds to move forward with the purchase, we are examining our budget to ensure we will have the funds for the operational costs of a facility that is 3 times larger than the current NHS building.

I remain extremely optimistic for all things NHS related! We are the little engine that could, and you—our stalwart supports—are the inspiration and fuel for our engine!

I thank each and everyone one of you for everything you do for the Nevada Historical Society and giving the NHS family the privilege of serving you and enriching our community.

Catherine
This was Nevada NHS Series
Nevada's First woman Sheriff

Although the involvement of women in law enforcement is becoming increasingly common today, this was not the case a half-century ago when Clara Dunham Crowell became Sheriff of Lander County, the first woman in the state to hold such a position.

The daughter of a pioneer Austin family, she was educated in the local schools and worked as a waitress before marrying George D. Crowell, a rancher who later ran a stage-line before being elected Sheriff.

NHSQ - 'Q' Article
This month's focus is about women that made a difference in the state of Nevada.

The article Tonopah Ladies is about the local women in Tonopah during the early 1900s.


NHSQ - Summer 1977 Volume XX #2, pages 92 to 100.

You can get to the article two different ways:

  1. Use the arrows on the lower right screen to move between the pages.
  2. Select pages on the left side of the screen.
From the NHS time vault : Shery Hayes-Zorn, Curator of Manuscripts is seen installing one of the HHH space costumes with Periann Scott and Karen Burns, 2011.

Those Fabulous MGM Costumes exhibit focused upon select costumes from the historic Hello Hollywood Hello show that ran in Reno from 1978 to 1989.
Curator Notes
Shery has been working on Research Requests while reading and watching several webinars as it relates to how to make content available and relevant with today's social distancing.

She has been formatting the popular This was Nevada NHS series , working on processing MS Finding Aids and helping gather photos for the Spring/Summer 2020 NHSQ.

In addition, she has been gathering old and new content to post on our website and Facebook pages and even created this new digital e-newsletter.

Shery
NHS ZOOM Backgrounds
Do you love Nevada History? Here is a way to spark interest during your video conference calls.

Please use our new Zoom backgrounds that were created from images and artifacts in our collection. Just right click and save them to your computer.

Nevada's Oldest Cultural Institution
Nevada Historical Society
1650 N. Virginia Street
Reno, NV. 89503
775.688.1190

NHS is part of the Dept. Tourism & Cultural Affairs, Div. of Museums & History