Jennifer Ortiz and Tim Glenn are genuinely stumped for an answer.
The question isn’t a hard one. The Museum of Utah is opening in less than two months and we’re wondering what their favorite item is. What is the artifact they’re most eager to show off to the public?
Jennifer is director of the Utah Historical Society. Tim is director of the soon-to-open museum. You’d think this would be easy.
But it turns out historians do not take history lightly.
They hem, they haw.
Finally, Jennifer says, “You know, it’s really hard picking a favorite. It is truly the whole space (that’s the favorite). It’s about the stories we’re telling — Utah’s stories — and about the experience we hope people will have hearing them.”
Then, too, there’s just so many items to choose from.
The new museum — Utah’s first ever state historical museum — will bring together 30,000 artifacts that are currently stuffed away in five storage locations around the Salt Lake Valley.
The vast majority of them have never been seen in public.
All 30,000 can’t be displayed when the museum opens June 27 in the North Capitol Building. About 950 will make the first cut. But every several months, the displays will rotate, bringing new pieces of history into the light of day. “We’ll regularly be bringing up materials that people will be able to see for the first time,” says Tim.
While it remains to be seen what artifacts and displays will emerge as the public’s favorites, one thing Jennifer and Tim know for sure: They can’t wait.
It’s been at least 10 years since serious talks started about Utah finding a place for its historical collections, and seven since then-House Speaker Brad Wilson spearheaded a quest to secure funding, stating, “We will be able to have Utahns see for the first time, in one place, a connected story about our state’s history and the different elements that have made our state the success that it is.”
“We’ve never had a museum before,” says Jennifer. “This is the first time we’ll actually be able to curate and display items in any sort of permanent exhibition.”
The director is too polite and diplomatic to add: It’s about time!
With the exception of Hawaii, every other state in the union already has a state museum. Utah is 49th out of 50 to make it happen.
In addition to the money coming from the state budget to build and house the museum on the first and second floors of the new building north of the Capitol, everyday Utahns have been contributing to the cause, knowingly or not, by purchasing black license plates.
Since the specialty plates were introduced in 2023, $2 from every sale has gone to the Utah Historical Society. About $8 million has been collected to date.
And while the license plate money is unconnected and only peripheral to the tax dollars that have made the museum possible, the extra cash has allowed the museum to purchase some additional items in advance of the June opening.
The shirt Marty McFly wore in “Back to the Future Part III,” for example.
McFly — played by Michael J. Fox — wore it in a scene filmed in Monument Valley in 1989, qualifying the shirt as a true Utah cinematic relic.
“We were able to purchase the shirt, which will be on display,” says Tim, “the license plate funds give us flexibility when things like that come up.”
The shirt went for $45,000 at auction, by the way — or 22,500 license plates.
The biggest item, literally, that will be front and center when the museum opens will be the legendary Mormon Meteor.
Avid race car driver and onetime Salt Lake City Mayor Ab Jenkins drove the Mormon Meteor to worldwide fame in the 1930s when he set numerous speed and endurance records on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
The state purchased the car from collector John Price, who owns the Price Museum of Speed.
At the museum’s grand opening in just seven weeks, the car will be joined by treasures such as the state’s first flag, an authentic pioneer handcart, wedding dresses made out of parachute material during World War II, a clock that stopped the moment the Scofield Mine exploded — and hundreds of other priceless artifacts that have been biding their time in storage waiting for the past to finally meet the present.
Admission to the museum, like the Smithsonian museums on the national mall in Washington, D.C., will be free to the public.
“We want to be the Smithsonian of the state of Utah,” says Jennifer. “We are so excited to open. It’s been a long time to just be behind the scenes.”
