Abstract
The Maurine and Fred Wilson and Dr. William S. Park Audiovisual Collection (approximately 1900s-1970s) consist of audiovisual material created by the Wilson and Park families. The materials depict the Park homes in Las Vegas, Nevada; Park and Wilson family members; outdoor activities and vacation trips to California, Colorado, and Mexico. The collection also documents early views of the Kiel Ranch in Las Vegas, Nevada, community parades and events, and early views of Las Vegas in the 1920s.
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Scope and Contents Note
The Maurine and Fred Wilson and Dr. William S. Park Audiovisual Collection (approximately 1900s-1970s) consist of audiovisual material created by the Wilson and Park families. The materials depict the Park homes in Las Vegas, Nevada; Park and Wilson family members; outdoor activities and vacation trips to California, Colorado, and Mexico. The collection also documents early views of the Kiel Ranch in Las Vegas, Nevada, community parades and events, and early views of Las Vegas in the 1920s.
Some segments from the 16mm reels were edited by Las Vegas TV station KLAS-TV in 1986 into three programs entitled "Vegas Yesterdays," "The Way it Was," and "Views In and About Las Vegas." UNLV holds these programs on videotape and are cataloged in the general library catalog.
Access Note
Collection is open for research. If use copies of the recordings do not exist, reformatting/production of use copies is required before access will be granted; this may delay research requests. Advanced notice is required.
Publication Rights
Materials in this collection may be protected by copyrights and other rights. See Reproductions and Use on the UNLV Special Collections and Archives website for more information about reproductions and permissions to publish.
Arrangement
Materials remain as they were received.
Biographical / Historical Note
Maurine Hubbard Wilson (1898-1990) was born in Missouri, but moved to Colorado with her parents
where she graduated from Colorado Women's College in Denver as a music major. In 1922, she married
Fred Holmes Wilson (1898-1958), a native of Cañon City, Colorado who had served in the Naval Geologic
Services during World War I. In 1925 the couple moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, where Fred worked for the
Post Office and Maurine taught music and served as the organist for the First Methodist Church.
Dr. William B. S. Park (1879-1946), son of John S. and Nancy Park, was born in Kentucky but raised in
California. He received his degree in dentistry in 1900. In 1907, William followed his father to the new town of Las Vegas, Nevada, and worked alongside his father at the First State Bank until 1912, when he
established his dental practice. William S. Park became interested in archaeology and worked with Dr. Mark
R. Harrington on the excavations of the Lost City site in 1924, and Gypsum Cave site in the early 1930s.
Park's interest continued after the excavations and alongside Richard "Chick" Perkins, he developed an
extensive collection of pre-ancestral Puebloan pottery, points, and other artifacts from the Lost City area.
The artifacts would form the basis of the Lost City Museum in Overton, Nevada.
Soon after their arrival in Las Vegas, the Wilsons met and became close friends with the Parks. They shared
a deep interest in the history, archaeology, and geology of southern Nevada, and the two families made
many trips throughout the southwest and California. In 1929, Fred Wilson and William S. Park began to
assemble a photographic and film history of early Las Vegas, documenting everything from baseball games
to the first air mail delivery to Las Vegas. Their efforts were cut short when Fred Wilson's health began to
decline in 1940. After that, Wilson devoted his time to historical research and Park turned to rock collection,
lapidary, and occasional expeditions to document petroglyph sites in southern Nevada until his death in
1946.
Maurine Hubbard Wilson preserved the legacies of her husband and William S. Park, donating the bulk of
the photographic and document collection the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Special Collections and
Archives over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. She died in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1990.
Sources:
"The Lost City," National Park Service, accessed April 18 2019, https://www.nps.gov/lake/learn/the-lostcity.htm
Hopkins, A. D., "A Heritage in Home Movies," Nevadan, March 16, 1980, pp.30-31J.
Philips, Marjory, "Maurine Hubbard Wilson: a salute to the people who are building our Southern Nevada
community," Nevada Manuscripts Program for the Bicentennial, 1976.
Preferred Citation
Maurine and Fred Wilson and William S. Park Audiovisual Collection, approximately 1900-1979. MS-00927. Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada.
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Acquisition Note
Materials were collected by UNLV Libraries; accession number 2019-037.
Processing Note
In 2017 Karla Irwin processed digital video files stored on optical discs. The digital files are derivatives of select Betamax tapes and were digitized by the Las Vegas News Bureau in approximately 2000.
In 2019, as part of an archival backlog elimination project, Sarah Jones rehoused the collection materials and created a collection level record in ArchivesSpace. No further work has been done on this collection.
Additional Description
Physical Description
56 items total as of September 2019.