The Curator
by Kurt GensheimerSome people are born knowing what they want to do with their life. In the case of East Ely Railroad Depot Museum director Sean Pitts, it’s always been working to keep history and heritage alive. And for railroad enthusiasts, there may be no better time portal to step through than on the grounds of the Nevada Northern Railway yard in Ely, hearing the stories Pitts tells from one of the greatest chapters of industry in American history.
“Understanding where people are and when they are has fascinated me since childhood,” said Pitts.
Pitts’ love for history was fueled at a young age, when his father took the family on educational road trips to historically significant places like Gettysburg, Saratoga and Washington D.C.; a tradition Pitts kept alive with his three children after becoming a father.
“To me, visiting the past was like visiting a foreign country,” said Pitts.
After studying Museum Administration at Utah State University, Pitts’ lifelong dream of becoming a museum director materialized in 1989, hired as the director of the White Pine Public Museum in Ely. The Museum was recognized as one of America’s best small Museums by the Institute of Museum Services. By 1991 he was hired by the State of Nevada as director of the East Ely Railroad Depot Museum which was later listed on the United States National Register of Historic Places, deeded to the State in 1990 by the City of Ely.
“When Kennecott closed in 1983, everything was left as you see it, except the buildings needed extensive restoration,” said Pitts.
From the very beginning of his 30-plus year tenure as museum director, Pitts came up with a plan to preserve and restore the entire railroad complex. After a $3.4M investment, the train depot and large freight building, dating back to 1906, were painstakingly restored to original condition and opened to the public. The museum’s exhibits tell the story of a mighty company that supplied an enormous copper boom after Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone and the electrical innovations of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison.
“The story lives in the artifact, but you need a person to tell the story. And contrary to popular opinion, I’m not an artifact of this place; I’m just a keeper of them,” said Pitts with a smile.
Pitts is one of two full time employees at the East Ely Depot, with an additional two part time staff; 10 times smaller than the staff of the other seven Nevada State Museums. Pitts and his team are the easternmost outpost of state history in Nevada, in the heart of the vast and unpopulated Great Basin.
“Lack of population doesn’t equate lack of heritage,” said Pitts. “We take our role as educators seriously, and we do what the other seven Nevada State Museums do with a lot less staff.”
As proof, Pitts’ office does far more than just curate the East Ely Depot; his office does outreach programs to anywhere in eastern Nevada, teaching programs like blacksmithing to high school students, taking elementary students on field trips to petroglyphs and the charcoal ovens and conducting archaeological digs with university students in abandoned mining towns.
Pitts’ career achievements in curating the history of Nevada are as impressive as they are significant. Pitts helped sponsor a University of Nevada, Reno archaeological dig in Shermantown, not far from Hamilton, one of the most important settlements in the Silver Rush. Pitts and his team were able to map the entire town by studying newspapers dating back to 1869, reading advertisements promoting where in town each business was located.
“We put together what would have been Shermantown’s main street, but the only problem was we didn’t know which direction the street faced,” said Pitts.
All they needed was one artifact to provide them with a clue as to which building they were standing on top of. As Pitts was concluding his talk to the students, he saw something on the ground.
“It was a piece of moveable typeface,” said Pitts. “We were standing on the location of the old newspaper office. It was the clue we needed to accurately map the entire town.”
An even more significant discovery was made in 1995; a discovery that went all the way to the floor of the U.S. Capitol, righting a 50-year wrong against an entire generation of Americans.
“It was the smoking gun to prove that the federal government put Japanese Americans in relocation camps during World War II,” said Pitts.
Because the Kennecott Copper Company mined and processed the majority of America’s copper for more than 75 years, the East Ely Depot was one of the most important railroad yards in American industry. And because Kennecott left the yard completely intact when they closed in 1983, every single record that passed through the yard’s offices were also preserved.
After local historian Jack Fleming perused the company’s records while researching a story, he noted the discovery of a document that caught the attention of UNLV PhD student Andrew Russell. Russell asked Pitts if the museum still had the document, and Pitts found it.
“It was a letter from the FBI to the superintendent of the railway outlining the agency’s concern that Japanese citizens could be a potential sabotage risk to American industry, including copper,” said Pitts. “The letter came less than a week after the Pearl Harbor attack.”
The document made its way to the floor of the U.S. Capitol, validating the right of Japanese Americans to receive reparations from the federal government, and that life-changing document came from a small and rural museum in Ely, Nevada.
Supporting and representing American’s small and rural museums has always been Pitts’ driving force as a historian.
“Collectively, it’s America’s small museums that hold the treasures of our heritage,” said Pitts. “Small museums are like the Noah’s Ark of American history.”
Beyond being the voice of Nevada’s smallest state-run museum, Pitts was also the representing voice of America’s small and rural museums when he was asked to testify before a Congressional committee in Washington D.C. on the needs of small and rural museums.
“I was the last speaker of seventeen museums represented, including the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan,” said Pitts. “But after my presentation, three congressmen asked me out to dinner. They were genuinely interested in the needs of America’s small and rural museums. What came of it was a federal assistance grant program specifically designed for small and rural museums.”
In the end, Pitts is most proud of keeping history alive, whether it’s through the stories of Native Americans or generations of American immigrants who worked for the Nevada Northern Railroad. After all, keeping history alive is at the foundation of everything Pitts does.
“If we fail to teach why history is important, it simply stops being important,” said Pitts. “My career has been built around teaching generations of Nevadans the importance of their own community, and that has been incredibly rewarding.”