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The Arizona Historical Society is celebrating its 150th anniversary by assembling a new exhibit in Tucson.
The group has pulled together 150 items that members feel best represent the history of the state.
The first item surrounds the door.
“We’re looking at the entrance of the Arizona Historical Society," said Laraine Daly Jones, the museum's collection manager. "You can see it’s a giant stone archway from the façade of the San Augustine Cathedral, the first cathedral in Tucson.”
The items don’t necessarily represent the important or the rare pieces. They are pieces selected by those involved with the museum.
“Staff, volunteers and board members chose these things from collections in Tucson, Tempe, Flagstaff, and Yuma. All over the state," she said.
Some of the artifacts date to the arrival of early European settlers.
The majority of artifacts in the special exhibit are gathered in one room.
But the Historical Society didn’t want to move others from their normal place, so they are noted with a special label.
With items varying in fame and infamy, from Geronimo’s rifle to the controversial Tucson artifacts, which some say show signs of Roman settlement but others call a hoax, it was quite a task to narrow the collection.
Daly Jones said one criteria was set when choosing the artifacts.
“Our executive director asked the staff to pick things that spoke to them in a personal way. We have some things which are attributed to important people and places, and we also have some mundane things that spoke to someone who was processing the piece," she said.
But some of those mundane-seeming items tell tales of Tucson’s past.
“That little paper airplane...is from a dinner held here in Tucson on the U of A campus, when Charles Lindberg came to town. After his famous trans-Atlantic flight, he did a cross-country promotional tour. And so he stopped in Tucson, and dedicated the Davis Monthan Airfield," she described.
The collection also emphasizes the importance of the recent past, and the role it will play once it is a part of history.
“We tend to think back in the past, and what’s happened in the past, but things are happening today that are going to be important 50 or 100 years from now," she said.
It’s easy to see two such examples in the museum.
The first, is a t-shirt with a familiar slogan from Tucson’s recent past, “Together We Thrive.”
“That’s from the aftermath of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. A couple of days afterwards there was a major memorial service over at the U of A and President Barrack Obama came to speak at it. These t-shirts were given out to the participants," she said.
Another item, while not from a single event, is symbolic of an issue that has dominated state politics for years.
“This is a litter. It was created by a group of illegal immigrants who were trying to cross the border between Mexico and Arizona. A woman in their group became seriously ill, and they feared for her life. So they decided, at great cost to themselves, to give up on their own intentions to cross the border safely. They created this from fallen limbs of trees and their undershirts and belts," she described.
The woman was carried on the stretcher to Interstate 19, where the group flagged down a passing vehicle for help.
Jones Daly said the mission of the Historical Society is to find items from throughout the state’s timeline in order to tell its story.
“That’s what we like to do here. To look to the past, and to look to today’s historical actions, and what’s going to happen in the future," she said.
The Arizona Historical Society’s 150th anniversary exhibit opened Saturday, and will run through the rest of the year.
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