Nevada
Historical
Society
Resources for Teachers
Featuring
Field Trips
Guided and Self-guided Museum Tours
History on Wheels:
Outreach into the Schools
Useful Stuff in the Museum Store
Including a 20% teacher discount
Research Opportunities
In the Library and Collections
Nevada Historical Society, 1650 N. Virginia Street, Reno, NV 89503
Nevada Historical Society
Resources for Teachers
A partnership with the Nevada Historical Society will help teachers meet their educational goals. The Historical Society’s galleries, outreach programs, and events support a variety of classroom needs including lesson planning and alternative, interactive learning opportunities. The Historical Society is the state’s oldest museum, and the largest and most complete repository of materials related to the history of Nevada and the Great Basin. From its beginnings in 1904, the Historical Society has dedicated itself to preserving and interpreting Nevada’s history through its collections of objects, photographs, manuscripts, and library materials. The five galleries in the permanent exhibition tell the different stories of how people have lived here more than 13,000 years. The Changing and Entry galleries offer a fresh look at a wide range of Nevada themes from art to artifacts.
This packet has been developed to assist teachers in the preparation of Nevada history lesson plans and with planning for field trips. The Nevada Historical Society provides a variety of ways to serve the educational goals of Nevada teachers. Field trips to the Historical Society provide a means of alternative, interactive learning through objects and presentations by live interpreters, and our galleries were designed in conformance with State and local history curriculum standards.
We hope you will read through this material and make the Historical Society a part of your annual history programming. We invite you to contact the education department at 775-688-1191, ext. 223 for additional information or to schedule tours. Or visit our website at (click Division of Museums and History, then Nevada Historical Society).
Note: The Nevada Historical Society’s educational programs serve the Washoe County and northern Nevada area. For educational museum programs in southern Nevada, contact the State Museum and Historical Society, 700 Twin Lakes Drive, Las Vegas, Nevada 89107, (702) 486-5205.
Table of Contents
I.Planning a Field Trip to the Nevada Historical Society
Basic Tour Information
Museum Manners
Description of our Galleries
Guided-tour Reservation Form
II.Self-guided Museum Tours for Organized School Groups
Self-guided Tour Reservation Form
III.History on Wheels: Outreach Programs
History on Wheels Reservation Form
IV.A Sampling of Resources for Students and Teachers at the Nevada Historical Society Museum Store
V.Research Opportunities in the Library and Collections
I.planning a field trip to the nevada historical society
Museum exhibits give students the opportunity to ask questions about the past and find their own answers. A field trip to the Nevada Historical Society can be integrated into Nevada history units using the background information provided on the next few pages.
Basic Tour Information
To arrange a field trip to the Nevada Historical Society, please call the education department at 775-688-1191, ext. 223. Select a day and time for your visit, and one or two alternate dates. The months of October and May are busy months for field trips, so we ask that you make reservations for those months as far in advance as possible. The Historical Society is adjacent the Fleischmann Planetarium. This allows for a combination trip, which makes for good use of bus and field trip time. Should you need to cancel a tour date, please notify us as soon as possible.
Museum tours typically last 60 minutes, but they can be tailored to the specific needs of your group. We can accommodate up to 40 students at one time. Groups with 40 or more students are encouraged to book a self-guided tour (see section II). When a group arrives at the Historical Society, it will be split into two smaller groups. One will go on a 30-minute tour of the permanent gallery, while the second group enjoys a 30-minute exploration of the Hands-On History Cart. At the end of the first 30 minutes, the groups switch places. If you choose to do a self-guided tour of the Historical Society, we are happy to provide you with a scavenger hunt to encourage exploration in the permanent galleries. We offer two scavenger hunts. One is geared to 2nd and 3rd graders, the other for 4th through 6th. If you would like to receive the scavenger hunt, please let us know at the time you book your visit.
Members of the Nevada Historical Society Docent Council are responsible for leading tours of the Historical Society galleries and introducing students to the objects on the Hands-On History Cart. The docents are trained volunteer museum guides who, using the Historical Society galleries, lead a general tour of Nevada History. If you would like the field trip to emphasize a specific aspect of Nevada history, please let us know when you make your field trip arrangements.
Museum Manners
The word “muse” means “to think.” A museum is a place to think, to explore, to discover, and to learn. This should be reflected in the way visitors conduct themselves while in a museum. Prior to your arrival, please review with your group the following comments on museum etiquette. It is not our wish to quell any enthusiasm, but it may be helpful if everyone is aware of acceptable behavior in a museum setting. Appropriate behavior makes it easier for all visitors to focus their attention on the displays and learn from their experience.
- Do not run in the museum.
- Do not touch anything on display unless there is a “please touch” sign. There are several hands-on activities to use while in the museum. Please listen to the tour guide as to when it is appropriate to use them.
- Do not eat, drink, or chew gum in the museum.
- Do not take photographs in the museum.
- If your tour is a guided one, please note that our guides have much information to impart. Please listen and feel free to ask lots of questions.
- For students—a pencil is the only writing tool to be used while filling out an activity sheet in the galleries. Using a pencil as a pointer could ruin an artifact or hurt someone. Please be careful. While filling out the activity sheet, the museum will provide clipboards for each student. It is important to use these clipboards instead of leaning against walls, artifacts, or using display cases as writing surfaces, since it could possibly cause damage to these items.
- Finally, your guide is a valued volunteer. Please express your appreciation.
Gallery Description
The story of Nevada’s history is told in the Nevada Historical Society’s permanent galleries through artifacts, photographs, maps, and text. The content of the galleries was developed in consideration of State and local history curriculum standards and provides alternative, interactive learning through objects and live interpreters. Nevada: Prisms & Perspectives tells five crucial stories about life in the Silver State.
Living on the Land
Although the land of the eastern Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin appears to be a difficult place to live, people have been living off the land for over 10,000 years. Paleolithic (stone age) Native Nevadans lived by taking only what they needed for food and shelter, and nurturing what was left so that they could return, in time, to again use resources for survival. About 1,000 years ago in the southern part of the state, the Anazai (the “Ancient Ones” in Hopi) built adobe towns and farmed the rich bottom lands of the Virgin and Muddy river valleys. More recently, four major groups have occupied what is now Nevada. The Washoe are in the corner around Lake Tahoe. The Northern Paiute range extends into what is now Oregon and Idaho, and to the southwest toward Owens Valley. To the east, the Western Shoshone range fills the middle section, and the Southern Paiute range includes parts of both Nevada and Utah.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Euroamericans began arriving in the Great Basin, first looking for wealth in the form of beaver pelts (used to make hats), and gold and silver. Later they came to stay, turning to farming and ranching. Today ranching and farming continue to prosper in Nevada. Although most of Nevada’s towns were founded to support mining or transportation, some have always been agricultural centers as well. In addition to cattle, sheep, and dairy farming, favored products include alfalfa, garlic, potatoes, and onions.
By the end of the nineteenth century, traditional Native American life was no longer possible, and many of the state’s Native Americans turned to the ranches and towns for jobs. Some adapted ancient arts to new markets. Washoe basket-maker Dat-so-la-lee is a prime example of someone who learned to adapt to the new way of life introduced by the non-Native settlers. She made her living in the first part of the twentieth century selling her baskets to people who viewed them as pieces of art.
Passing Through
People have been crossing Nevada, on their way to somewhere else, for decades. Tracing the origins of Interstate 80 demonstrates the history of our roadways. The path that Interstate 80 takes traces the journey that the Washoe used when they moved into the mountains from the north during the summer season. It was the route into the Sierra Nevada used by John C. Frémont when he became the first Euroamerican to see Lake Tahoe, and it became the wagon road that the Donner Party took in its attempt to get to California. The Central Pacific Railroad was built as part of the transcontinental railroad along this route, and U.S. highway 40, which was the Victory Highway, followed that same path first laid by the Washoe, and which is now Interstate 80.
Until the twentieth century, for the most part, when people passed through Nevada they walked. After 1850, Euroamericans started to cross Nevada using horses, mules, and oxen to haul wagons. Freight and stage coach lines grew up in the 1860s to service the many mining camps, and in 1867 the Central Pacific Railroad laid the first track, from the Sierra Nevada into the Truckee Meadows, on the way to making its transcontinental link with the Union Pacific in Promontory Point, Utah in 1896.
By the 1880s, bicycling was a national craze and the first true highways were laid out to provide safe cycling. New mining camps in Tonopah and Goldfield, shortly after 1900, benefited from a growing number of automobiles, which in turn opened up the tourism market for Nevada after the end of World War II. In the 1920s, the federal government pioneered air mail routes across Nevada.
Riches from the Earth
The Great Basin has been the source of fabulous mineral wealth for hundreds of years. For centuries, Natives mined salt and turquoise. In the nineteenth century, prospectors returning to the East from the Mexican-American war and the first wave of the California Gold Rush found traces of gold in streams on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. Real excitement began in 1859, when placer miners panning the streams of Gold Canyon in the Virginia Mountains discovered that the blue clay that had been seen as a nuisance was really remarkably rich silver ore. The “Rush to Washoe” brought thousands of ‘49ers flocking to the Comstock Lode camps of Virginia City, Gold Hill, and Silver City, in the renewed hope of finding their fortunes.
Mining brought modern civilization and towns to Nevada. Nevada silver and gold built the stock exchange in San Francisco, helped pay for the Civil War, and fostered statehood for Nevada in 1864. Camps boomed and then went bust all over the state. Then for more than twenty years, there was nothing, and the state almost blew away. In 1902, Tonopah, in central Nevada, suddenly boomed, followed in a few years by Goldfield. About the same time, large-scale copper mining started in White Pine County. Today Nevada is the largest producer of gold in the county, and mining is still a major industry in the Silver State.
Neon Nights
Nevada is known around the world as a place offering funand instant fortune. The Corbett-Fitzsimmons championship boxing match in 1897 was the first time Nevada attracted national attention for allowing an event that was illegal everywhere else in the country. About the same time, the state’s liberal residency laws (six weeks eventually) began attracting people looking for a speedy divorce, and more often, a quick marriage, laying the foundation for the tourist industry in the process. Gambling was made legal in Nevada in 1931 in order to support tourism and business in the face of the Great Depression.
The Federal Presence
Although Nevada is the seventh largest state in the Union, the federal government owns approximately 87% of the land, making the federal presence central to the development of the Silver State in the twentieth century. Federal water reclamation programs had their start with the Newlands Project in 1902, which took water from the Carson and Truckee rivers to make the desert around Fallon bloom. The fact that the Paiute fishery at Pyramid Lake was hurt in the process has led to the longest-running federal law suit in history, which is still unresolved. The construction of Hoover Dam (1931-1935) brought abundant water and electrical power to Clark County in the south and sparked the transformation of Las Vegas from a division point on the railroad into one of the fastest growing cities in the country.
With World War II came thousands of men and women in the military services, some passing through, and some staying to work in defense industries. Huge military bases sprouted up throughout the state. After the war, the testing of nuclear bombs spurred further growth. Even today, after the testing has ended, Nevada is facing federal pressure to become the storehouse for the nation’s nuclear waste.
Nevada Historical Society
Guided School Tours
Reservation Request
Please fill out a separate form for each program requested
Contact Name ______
School & Address ______
Contact Phone # ______E-mail Address ______
Grade level(s) ______Number of Studentson Tour ______
I would like to schedule a one-hour tour:
Day and Time Requested:
1st choice ______
2nd choice ______
General tour policies:
- At least two weeks notice is required for guided tours.
- Guided tours are subject to the availability of volunteers and staff. If guides are not available, tours may be re-scheduled or self-guided.
- Tours are limited to one class of approximately 40 students. Special arrangements may be made for larger groups with advanced notice.
- If your group will be delayed or you need to cancel a tour, please call the Historical Society at 775-688-1191, ext 223.
- Teachers and adult chaperones are responsible for the discipline of the group. Please review “Museum Manners” with your students prior to your visit.
Four ways to submit this form:
1)Fax to 775-688-2917
2) Call 775-688-1191, ext. 223
3) E-mail
4) On-line at
II.self-guided museum tours for organized school groups
Free Admission for students, teachers, and adult chaperones
Monday – Friday, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Make a reservation
Self-guided tours are limited to 60 students.
Call the Museum at (775) 688-1191, ext. 223 to schedule a self-guided tour.
Divide the class into groups of 10 students
Small groups facilitate learning and maintain discipline.
One adult escort for every 10 students is required
Adult escorts are responsible for supervising their groups in accordance with safety and security guidelines as well as helping students with their assignments.
Historical Society Scavenger Hunt
Scavenger hunts are available for grades 2 and 3, and 4 to 6. Scavenger hunts are a fun way to facilitate learning and observation. Ask for the scavenger hunt forms when you make your reservation.
Museum Manners
Please share “Museum Manners” with your class before your visit.
Enjoy your visit to the Nevada Historical Society!
Nevada Historical Society
Department of Education
1650 N. Virginia Street
Reno, NV 89503
775-688-1191, ext. 223
Fax 775-688-2917
Nevada Historical Society
Self-guided Tours
Reservation Request
Please fill out a separate form for each program requested
Contact Name ______