Curator of Juneau museum leaving

Mary Pat Wyatt was dismayed when she began assessing the assortment of objects that would become the first collection of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum.

With a background in art history and sculpture, and stints at the Smithsonian Institution and the Anchorage Historical and Fine Arts Museum, Wyatt was used to baskets, ivory and finely sewn moccasins. What she found in Juneau was wrenches, lots of them. Old, greasy, mass-manufactured wrenches left over from the town's mining boom.

"One of the first things I did was create records for all the things. I think we had like about 52 wrenches. You get really tired of the wrenches," said Wyatt, who retired last week from her job as city museum curator, a post she held for 20 years.

The wrench collection was left over from the Last Chance Mining Museum, which closed in 1982.

"We proposed that, instead of a mining museum, it would be smart for Juneau to have a museum that interpreted all of its history," Wyatt said.

The city museum eventually took up residence in the former Juneau Public Library in 1989.

The new space had a few drawbacks - no insulation behind the bookshelves that still lined the walls and worn, hideous 1970s emerald-green carpeting. A generous donation from Larry Persily in memory of his late wife, Leslie Murray, paid for renovations, and within five years the space was full of exhibits.

And it wasn't just wrenches, though by that time, Wyatt says she'd learned to appreciate the mining items.

"You started to appreciate how hard humans work when they have enough incentive to do it. I learned more about the history of mining. Mines opened the Northwest," she said. Over the years the museum has received from families several enormous collections that included furniture, clothing and gold watches. One such collection, donated by Caroline Jensen, originated in the Peterson mining family.

"The Peterson girls were known because they were teenagers and their father died and the girls and their mother kept running the mine out there - a hard rock mine," Wyatt said.