The Museum of Northern Arizona and the Colton Legacy

In nineteen twenty-eight, a zoologist named Harold Colton and his wife Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton, an artist, founded the Museum of Northern Arizona in a city that barely existed before the railroad arrived fifty years earlier. The Coltons had moved to Flagstaff from Philadelphia in nineteen twenty-six. Mary-Russell, who was known in eastern artistic circles for her painting, turned her eye to the Southwest and began documenting and collecting the material culture of the plateau.

The museum they built became the principal repository for the archaeology, ethnology, and natural history of the Colorado Plateau, the vast tableland that covers much of the Four Corners region. Its collections include ceramic vessels, weavings, and objects belonging to the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, and Pai peoples. The Ethnology Gallery was designed specifically to represent those communities on their own terms as living cultures rather than historical curiosities.

Harold Colton also gave a name to the pre-Columbian people his excavations kept turning up around Flagstaff: the Sinagua. He coined that term in the nineteen thirties. It was not a name those people used for themselves; they left no written record of their own name. But the archaeological category Colton created organized decades of subsequent research and is still in use.

The museum grew from two rooms to a twenty-four-thousand-seven-hundred-square-foot building, with a research library and adjacent botanical garden. Katharine Bartlett, who joined as curator in nineteen thirty and stayed for fifty-one years, turned it into a serious research institution. It remains the intellectual center of Colorado Plateau studies.