New Mining & Railroad Museum director is fulfilling a lifetime ambition
In 1999, before he embarked for college on a Minnesota coast of Lake Superior, Jason Huntzinger told a friend not only that he would live in Helper, but what he would do there. “I’ll teach photography at the nearby college and work at the museum,” he reportedly said.
True enough, Huntzinger is an adjunct professor of photography at Utah State University Eastern. And now, he has been promoted as the director of the Western Mining and Railroad Museum in the very town he sought out nearly two decades ago.
Crazy
“(The friend) thought the Helper idea was a crazy idea,” Huntzinger said.
The museum assistant the past two years, Huntzinger is changing the institution’s outlook, creating exhibits that start a tour that provides the geological, prehistoric and immigrant history of the Carbon County area.
“I’ve always been intrigued by Old West mining towns,” he said. “I like to discover these unsung places.”
A native of Duluth, Minn., but growing up in Pleasant Grove, Utah, Huntzinger would get a taste of his future community, visiting neighboring Spring Glen every summer.
“My favorite aunt lives here,” he said of Leann Fazzio. Her husband Ike Fazzio’s family owned Blue Hill Dairy, which was in a film promoting Helper businesses ironically found in Huntzinger’s museum today.
Huntzinger loved his trip south making for his being dropped into a prehistoric landscape.
“It was fascinating for me,” he said. “It was different, being here.”
The new exhibits are two rooms, one finished, the other on its way. The first sees a massive dinosaur footprint and a visual interactive mechanism for children, with an overhead photo of Helper founder Teancum Pratt, who sold his homestead to the town, on the other end. Pratt’s visage is alongside a quote from Wallace Stegner expressing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s considerations of the area, about it being a “plateau province” and a demonstration of the span of geologic time exceeding any other. (Huntzinger’s title for a Sept. 2015 exhibit at Price’s Gallery East, “Within the Teeth of Geologic Time,” was inspired by Stegner’s commentary.)
New arrangement
The second will feature the area’s history of immigrants, who brought 27 languages with them by the turn of the prior century. (Immigrants even stayed at the museum when the 103-year-old building was the Helper Hotel.) The many items currently found there, which include several high school dance documents dating back decades, will be used for an “entertainment” exhibit upstairs, Huntzinger said.
And Huntzinger has revived vintage photographs, the work of more than a year seen in the The Warren Kiefer Photography Collection, a museum exhibit. Kiefer’s collection remained at the Museum of Western Colorado until Matt Darling, a railroad historian from Grand Junction, Colo., contacted the museum about 1,400 photographs.
The museum’s new exhibits were possible because of grants from the Utah Division of Arts & Museums this year and last.
Huntzinger emphasized that Helper’s main street is a designated National Historic District and his facility is the administrative resource of historic preservation grants from the state of Utah.
“We determine projects that fit the grant criteria to preserve, maintain and improve the buildings in the historic district,” Huntzinger wrote. “These grants have greatly aided the revitalization of Main Street.”
When he advocated for persons to apply for the grants, Huntzinger also pleaded for persons to not throw away old signs particularly from their buildings.
Restoration is possible
“They have a lot of appeal and can be restored… bring them to the museum,” Huntzinger said. “The value of our historic Main Street is in this history.” So valuable, Huntzinger added, that it attracts surprised visitors.
”A lot of them are just making a random stop; they see these brown historic signs that say ‘national historic district and museum’ and that’s what gets them off the highway,” he remarked. “They are amazed by this little place; it’s like it’s back in time… I, as the director, want to advocate for the importance of keeping (that) in place.”
Huntzinger further defined his role as it pertains to the community. “It’s important to try to maintain our authenticity while at the same time, creating a new era for Helper,” he said. “Part of the role of ‘director’ is just creating an awareness about the importance of preserving this unique history here as far as the structural and visual impact of Main Street.”
Huntzinger lived back in Duluth for much of his adult life before considering Helper again in 2014, when he returned to Utah. He saw that the assistant director position was open. “I’m really thrilled with how things have kind of aligned here,” he said. “Nothing feels like a job, really.”
Before he called for volunteers and said he was “thrilled” about the qualifications of his own new assistant, Huntzinger wanted to give credit to past Helper historic preservation personnel. He specifically mentioned Madge Tomsic, who worked at the museum for 17 years.
“I’m working off everything they’ve done,” Huntzinger said, “to get it to this point.”
Award-winning photography
Huntzinger earned a bachelor’s of fine arts degree, photography emphasis, from the University of Minnesota-Duluth. His photos have been exhibited at locations including Minneapolis and Seattle and were enjoyed by a fan base in Duluth. He has won multiple career development grants, best photography awards at fairs and got a best photography exhibit nod.
He described on his Facebook artist fan page that besides “remote locations” and “unique geological formations” (as may be expected), he likes sunlight, fog, “extreme weather conditions,” port towns, ships, “gorgeous guitar feedback” and basketball.