The macabre details of the Donner Party tragedy have turned Donner Memorial State Park into an international draw for visitors from around the globe. But for years, the aged museum buildings and antiquated exhibits have struggled to tell the tale of one of the West’s most notorious and desperate struggles for survival.
This summer, that will all begin to change, as construction crews build a new parking lot and lay the groundwork for a new 9,000 square foot High Sierra Crossing Museum, which will tell the story of the Donner Party and the emigrants who came before and after them.
‘The focal point of the park is the Donner Party tragedy, but what goes along with that is the railroad, highway history, and the whole emigrant spirit,’ said Scott Elliott, acting superintendent of the Sierra District of California State Parks.
Steps from the towering 1918 Donner Party monument, below which the remains of deceased Donner Party members are said to have found their final resting place, orange construction fence and uprooted trees mark the progress of the new museum.
This summer, a larger landscaped parking lot will take the place of the current parking area. Over 100 trees will be removed to make way for the new parking lot and museum, which will be built alongside the current museum but closer to the campground. Many of those trees will be replaced after the project is complete. The old museum structure will be used for offices and storage space before it is eventually removed once its life span ends. The construction plan calls for the existing museum to remain open through the construction process.
Funding for the new High Sierra Crossing Museum comes from Federal Highway Administration funds and a 2002 California State Parks bond. State parks officials hope the project will be completed by the end of next summer’s construction season.
The construction follows years of planning, a scuttled attempt to build the museum on the shores of Donner Lake, and an in-depth archeological dig that turned up limited artifacts and cleared the way for construction.
‘I think before this became a state park in the 1920s, those sites had been memorialized and, unfortunately, very well picked over,’ said Elliott. ‘A lot of that stuff is long gone from the elements.’
The new museum will offer more room to tell more details of the Donner Party story, as well as the history of local Native American culture, the railroad, the construction of Interstate 80, and natural resource history.
Updated exhibits will feature new artifacts, like the pages of an 1846 New Jersey newspaper the park recently acquired in which George Donner placed an ad for ‘oxmen’ to help him with his family’s journey West.
One of the major benefits possible with the expanded museum is that it will become more attractive to meet the growing demand for historic tourism, according to California State Parks. Elliott noted that a German public television camera crew was recently filming in the park, and said that visitors from all corners of the globe regularly come to the museum.
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