Museums - Riverside Metropolitan Museum

The Riverside Municipal Museum opened in the basement of City Hall in 1924, after the widow of National Biscuit Company magnate Cornelius Earle Rumsey donated his collection of Native American artifacts to the City of Riverside. Since then, its collections have grown, typically through donations by prominent citizens and organizations. In 1948 it moved to its present location, a post office building that had been constructed in 1914. In the 1960s, under innovative director Charles Hice, the museum broke out of its traditional role as a depository of collectables donated by city notables and moved toward a new existence as a modern museum. New exhibits and community-oriented programs have brought about its current configuration.
The anthropology collection at the Riverside Municipal Museum consists of approximately 20,000 items. About 5,000 of these are Native American baskets, the bulk of which are from the western United States, especially Arizona and California. It also includes seventeenth and eighteenth century Eskimo tools as well as contemporary Inuit steatite sculptures. There is a small collection of Plains beadwork. The museum has an outstanding collection of Native American cradle boards that features examples from every major culture area in North America where the cradle was used. The collection as a whole numbers fifty-eight objects, including twenty-three doll cradles, assembled from over thirty-five tribal groups. The museum also houses a research library related to Northern Native Americans.