The Favell Museum

In downtown Klamath Falls, in a low building of dark lava stone near the Link River, stands one of the finest private collections of Native American artifacts and Western art in the region, the Favell Museum. It was opened in nineteen seventy two by Gene Favell, a longtime Klamath Falls resident who caught the collecting bug as a boy, gathering arrowheads and tiny working model firearms. Over a lifetime that boyhood habit grew into something remarkable.

The museum today holds more than one hundred thousand Native American artifacts, some of them as much as twelve thousand years old, arrowheads and spear points, obsidian blades knapped from the volcanic glass of this region, beadwork, and basketry. Alongside them hang paintings and bronzes by well known Western artists, and Favell's famous collection of miniature firearms, tiny but fully functional. The building itself, built of the region's black lava rock, is a striking landmark in its own right.

For a small city, it is an unexpected treasure, a window into the deep human history of the Klamath Basin and the artistry of the peoples who lived here for thousands of years before the town existed.