Arts & Entertainment Community

New museum exhibits feature little boats, racing roosters

Two new Harbor History Museum exhibits showcase little boats and racing roosters.

The Special Exhibitions Gallery is featuring “Little Boats: Homegrown Innovation.” The exhibit features a range of full-size, model and toy boats, including Avanti, which is featured in  Small Boats Magazine. and a classic 14-foot Torpedo runabout from AristoCraft. These speedsters are coupled with a small, older boat used to take goods to market and a half-sized seine skiff just right for kids to step aboard.

Local boat designer-builder Riley Hall takes Avanti out for a spin around the harbor. Photo courtesy of Kathy Hall

Many of the toy boats are from the collection of Harbor History Museum shipwright Riley Hall, with a few unique treasures from its collection, such as Paul Gustofson’s set of local ferries and a West Coast native canoe model. “Little Boats” will be on view through August.

Featured in the lobby gallery is “Welcome to Roosterville,” made possible through a Creative Endeavors grant from the Gig Harbor Arts
Commission. “Welcome to Roosterville” is a fun exhibit of photographs and ephemera from the early days of Clarence Shaw’s racing roosters. The first race was a huge hit, held on what was then Front Street to help celebrate the opening of the new grandstand at the head of the bay.

Clarence Shaw was the creator of Roosterville and Gig Harbor’s famous racing roosters. Here the “Roosterettes” open the starting gate for the roosters’ 80-yard dash. Photo by Frank Owen Shaw, Harbor History Museum Collection

Shaw’s racing roosters became so popular that in 1938 that they were invited to appear on the New York radio show Hobby Lobby with a demonstration at Madison Square Garden. Movie studios made newsreels of the roosters that were shown at theaters across the nation. Through these newsreels and numerous newspaper and magazine articles, including Life, Popular Science and Argosy, Shaw and his rooster races put Gig Harbor on the map for over 50 million people worldwide. The exhibit will only be available through the end of March.

The museum is at 4121 Harborview Drive. Current hours are Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free, compliment of the city of Gig Harbor. For more information, call (253) 858-6722 or visit www.HarborHistoryMuseum.org.