There are changes in Yosemite’s Wawona, including a new name and more diversity
National Park Service documents written into the 2000s describe the Pioneer Yosemite History Center – a cluster of old buildings made into a historic village in Yosemite National Park – as a place for interpreting Anglo-American history, but “pretty much nobody associated with these buildings is Anglo-American.”
They were Chinese, African American, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Scottish and Irish immigrants, said Adam Ramsey, supervisory park ranger of interpretation in Yosemite’s Wawona District, which includes the history center.
Anglo-American can mean a few things, but it generally refers to someone of English descent, Ramsey said. Perhaps the phrase was mistakenly used to describe anyone white, the ranger added.
Yosemite is now working to tell a fuller story that includes all the groups who helped make Wawona and the entire park what it is today.
“I think that’s really important that we do that,” Ramsey said this week while walking through the history center, “and the work is done for us, it’s the truth! ... So that makes our job easy. It’s not like we’re trying to add a diversity story. It is the story.”
There are new exhibits in the history center working to tell more of those stories. That includes a Chinese Laundry Building, and exhibits in an old superintendent’s building that describe how hundreds of African American U.S. Army soldiers – the Black men often known as Buffalo Soldiers – were among Yosemite’s first stewards prior to the formation of the National Park Service.
A ribbon-cutting event to unveil the Chinese Laundry Building was planned for Friday morning – also the first day this fall that day-use reservations won’t be required to enter Yosemite.
Pioneer no more, there’s a new name: Yosemite History Center
Another big unveiling planned for Friday: The Pioneer Yosemite History Center is now called the Yosemite History Center, a name change approved by Yosemite’s leadership team this summer. New signs are expected to be installed next year in this relatively quiet corner of the park, best known for the historic Wawona Hotel.
Ramsey said while the word pioneer means different things, it lends itself to “misinterpretation and misrepresentation” in Wawona, often conjuring up images of frontier people who settled the West, while the buildings in the Yosemite History Center tell the story of the birth of tourism in the park. Ramsey said surveys also showed that many people of color react somewhat negatively to the word pioneer, feeling like the history books have left them out of that American story.
“We’re not making things up,” Ramsey said of how park interpretation is evolving in Wawona and throughout Yosemite. “We’re not changing the story. It is the story, and it’s always been the story, it just took a little extra work for us to find that story. So we’re not changing the narrative so much as being more accurate and inclusive of the real story.”
Chinese Laundry Building in Wawona’s Yosemite History Center
The racism of the past, at the heart of numerous former California laws meant to exclude and limit people of color, is part of why it took some extra work to find and share some of these stories.
Yosemite Park Ranger Yenyen Chan is among those who went looking in research libraries and Yosemite’s archives for the stories of Chinese American contributions to the park. She found hundreds of Chinese names.
Her interest in this history started many years ago – piqued as she drove through the small town of Chinese Camp along Highway 120 on her way to work. She would learn that hundreds of Chinese immigrants helped build that road’s continuation in Yosemite, the stunning Tioga Road that crosses over the Sierra Nevada in Yosemite, and other park roads, including the one that leads to Wawona.
She’s helping tell that history and more via new exhibits in Wawona’s Chinese Laundry Building. The brown-sided building along Forest Drive, just past a historic barn and covered bridge, was most recently used for storage after it ceased to be a Wawona Hotel laundry decades ago, run by Chinese Americans.
The building’s renovation was funded by a generous donation to the Yosemite Conservancy from Wawona’s Wong-Yee family.
The Chinese Laundry Building will be open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. through Oct. 14, Ramsey said. There aren’t regular fall or winter hours after that because interpretive park rangers in Wawona are seasonal employees. The building will be open regularly again beginning in spring 2022, likely from mid-April through mid-October.
The exhibit has been a labor of love for Chan, who was born in California and whose parents immigrated from Hong Kong.
“The stories of these immigrants, and all the people from around the world, I think there’s a connection for people who may not see themselves in these national parks,” Chan said of expanding Yosemite’s storytelling. “These parks were successful, built from, all these people that contributed to the establishment.”
More diverse stories and expanding park interpretation
Telling more diverse stories is increasingly important to the National Park Service and Yosemite Conservancy, Yosemite’s largest philanthropic partner.
“We do receive guidelines for priorities for things that we should be including in our interpretive messaging,” Ramsey said. “Some of those priorities include diversifying the stories that we tell, to be more inclusive of underserved histories and underserved audiences, so that’s a big national level push, to increase our relevance and diversity.”
Work on that front included a Yosemite event this summer that celebrated Japanese American artist Chiura Obata; the continued construction of a new Native American village in Yosemite Valley; and a women’s exhibit at The Ahwahnee hotel.
Women’s historical contributions are getting a boost in Wawona, too. One example: Some interpretive signs to be updated in its historic village include one about Bridget Degnan, founder of Degnan’s in Yosemite Valley, a popular deli and bakery, to give more credit to Bridget instead of her husband, John. The only real reason to talk about John in relation to the deli is as Bridget’s husband, Ramsey said with a smile.
Ramsey can relate to the spirit of people from around the world who made Yosemite home. Ramsey came to work in the park over 10 years ago, arriving in Yosemite on a bus with just two bags after working for NPS in cities on the East Coast. Ramsey became head of interpretation for the Wawona District three years ago.
There’s also years of deferred maintenance to be addressed in the Yosemite History Center. New renovations are planned to repair the buildings, along with new barricades to be installed within buildings to keep visitors from touching items within – what will hopefully translate to buildings there being open more often.
They are generally closed due to limited staffing, Ramsey said. Most of the seasonal interpretive rangers Ramsey oversees spend their summer months in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, near Yosemite’s south entrance. The Yosemite History Center is normally just staffed by one park ranger who doubles as a stagecoach driver, along with a few volunteers. There are no interpretive rangers in Wawona or the park’s Mariposa grove in the winter and some spring and fall months.
Yosemite Conservancy funds much of what happens in the Yosemite History Center, which has included stagecoach rides and blacksmith demonstrations. The organization’s roots are all about Yosemite history. The group was created in 1923 to raise money for the Yosemite Museum in Yosemite Valley.
“It’s important for us to honor our history, but we’re not bound by it,” said Frank Dean, Yosemite Conservancy’s president and chief executive officer. “We want to learn from history. It’s not all positive. ... How did we get here, and how do we continue to grow and make things better?”
Honoring people in the background
The telling of many new Yosemite stories is also about recognizing people often resigned to the background of history – the workers who helped make Yosemite National Park what it is today.
One of these stories is that of Tie Sing, the Chinese American head chef for Yosemite adventures led by Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, created in 1916. Yosemite was first protected in 1864 by the Yosemite Grant Act.
“Sing’s acclaimed feasts earned him wide admiration and contributed to Mather and the group’s success in convincing Congress to form the National Park Service one year after their first wilderness trip together,” a new exhibit about him reads in Yosemite’s Chinese Laundry Building.
Sing Peak, that sits on the border of Yosemite and the Ansel Adams Wilderness in Sierra National Forest, was named after him. Yosemite and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, which helped support the Chinese Laundry Building, have led annual pilgrimages to that mountain to honor early Chinese contributions in the park.
Chan sees the contributions of Sing and other workers like him as key to the success of Yosemite and the National Park Service.
“Stephen Mather said this, ‘Give a man a poor breakfast after he’s had a bad night’s sleep, and he won’t care how fine your scenery is.’ ... We need to highlight these stories of all the people that have made the parks what they are today,” Chan said.
Yosemite rangers hope telling a wider range of stories will help more visitors feel more connected.
“People like to see somebody that they recognize in the materials that they read, in the stories that they read,” Ramsey said. “Having people whose motivations are familiar, whose cultures are similar, or whose faces look the same, or whose skin color looks the same. That adds just so much potential for very strong connection to a place.”
This story was originally published September 30, 2021 at 3:00 PM with the headline "There are changes in Yosemite’s Wawona, including a new name and more diversity."
