Ferndale Museum

The collection includes furnishings and equipment from the 1850s to the middle 20th century.

Historical exhibits include a simulated town street, where visitors can look through windows and doors of what could have been homes and businesses[8] in late 1800s to early 1900s.[4] A working player piano is located in a Victorian parlor near detailed miniature Victorian dollhouses.[9]

Banks of switchboards, where operators used corded plugs to connect callers, are displayed along with working crank telephones.[10][8] Other historical exhibits include nautical history and artifacts from the first oil well drilled (1865) in California at Petrolia.[4]

Exhibits include farming,[11][12] ranching, and blacksmithing.[4] The lumber and dairy industry are also covered.[13]

Native American artifacts, including baskets from the local Wiyot,[11] Yurok, Karuk and Hupa, are exhibited along with interpretive information. Other artifacts include a woman's buckskin headband, hair ties used by a shaman, a smoking pipe, wrapping skin, and a gambling drum.[14] Native wildlife displays also help interpret life of the times.[9]

Artwork exhibited include paintings from the 1860s by noted portrait painter Stephen William Shaw.

Ferndale resident Joseph Jordan Bognuda (2 October 1889 Vacaville, California – 7 January 1979) became interested in earthquakes after living through the 1906 San Francisco which caused considerable damage in Ferndale and over the entire Eel River Valley.[3] Bognuda began a correspondence with Dr. Periz Byerly[15] and attended lectures at the University of California at Berkeley which resulted in the university and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey establishing a Ferndale Seismographic Station with a lighter Bosch-Omori Seismograph than the one in active use at Berkeley at the same time.[16][15]

The Ferndale Museum in Ferndale, California collections include furnishings and equipment from the 1850s to the middle 20th century including this working Bosch-Omori Seismograph.[1]

Omori Seismographs were developed by Fusakichi Omori, a seismologist at the Imperial University of Tokyo and further refined by J.A. Bosch of Strasbourg who added a damping mechanism.[17]

Bosch-Omori Seismographs are made of two units, one to detect movement North to South and the other East to West. Each has a pendulum which can pivot, restrained by a flexible wire and have a recording needle which traces on smoked paper, controlled by a weight-powered timepiece.[18]

The seismograph parts were shipped from Berkeley to Ferndale and assembled by Bognuda and Horace Winslow[15][19] of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in what is now the Ferndale Fire Department building.[3] This new Ferndale Station, abbreviated "FER" – located at 40°34′33.74″N 124°15′48.92″W – became active on January 25, 1933.[16][1]

During the nearly 30 years FER station was in operation,[3] newspapers throughout the U.S. contacted it for information about California earthquakes.[20] With daily observations, Bognuda solved an old puzzle about constantly wiggling traces, by correlating vibrations recorded at FER station to heavy surf on the nearby coast,[21] an effect now called wave-generated microseism.[22]

J.D. Murry giving a blacksmithing demonstration in the Ferndale Museum Annex. He is pictured working iron atop a 104 pound Trenton anvil dating from the 1930's.

The FER station became inactive in 1962 when advances in seismic technology rendered it and several others in the state obsolete.[16] The Bosch-Omori seismograph was donated to the city of Ferndale by the university,[18] which moved to the museum[9] in 1981[19] where it continues to record daily.[3][10][23][1]

A working blacksmith shop[5] and forge displays hundreds of items that made up a local blacksmith shop. Live demonstrations of blacksmithing are given in the shop.

The exhibit is a complete 19th century forge (also known as a Smithy or Blacksmith Shop) originally located in Table Bluff, California. It has over 46 hammers, two anvils, tongs, rasp, wire brushes, chisels, gloves, aprons, a coal and/or coke fired forge, bellows, and numerous other tools of the trade. The shop operated from at least 1875 until 1962 under various owners. Also displayed are 80 cattle branding irons.[4]

In 2022, attendance was around 1,300 in addition to a total of approximately 750 museum memberships.[24][9]

The museum is nonprofit[24] and supported privately with memberships, attendance donations, donations, and grants.

The museum employs a director who is hired and managed by its board of directors.[24] The museum contracts services for the original research and publication of its research oriented newsletter, Our Story.[24]