Overview of Our Collections
The Museum has been collecting items relating to the history of skiing since 1977. In 2003 the Paumgarten Family Archival Center opened a short distance from the Museum in Franconia Notch State Park, providing the Museum with a much-improved situation for housing the collections.
The Paumgarten Family Archival Center in early winter.
The interior of the Robert J.A. Irwin Library. The Museum owns about 1,700 volumes, and 390 titles of periodicals. The collection of about 490 posters is also housed in the library.
Inside the Robert Irwin Library
The New England Ski Areas Council Board room is useful for researchers to spread their work out, and is used for quarterly meetings of the Board of Directors.
The board room in the Paumgarten Building
The Thad Thorne ski room contains about 735 pairs of skis, the best in the collection. Another 200 or so are housed off-site. Skis are arranged in by date, as can best be determined.
Skis in the Thad Thorne Ski Room
Scrapbooks are differentiated between those assembled mainly with newspaper clippings, like this one from Walter Prager, and those with photographs.
Clipping scrapbook in the Museum’s collection
There are over 2,500 reels of film in the collection, including 2,040 100-foot reels in the John Jay Collection, the raw material from which the filmmaker’s well-known films were produced.
Part of the film collection in the Paumgarten Building.
Large collections of archives are stored in record storage boxes, while the Literature files hold smaller, folder-level printed material.
Archival material in literature files
