Museum Artifacts

About our Museum Collections

Grey Towers has an on-site collection of over 17,000 historic objects and documents. The collection dates from 18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-centuries and are of mixed medium to include paintings, sculptures, furniture, textiles, photographs, natural history specimens, books, manuscripts, and archival documents. As an historic house museum of the first chief of the USDA Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, our mission aims to perpetuate the conservation legacy of the Pinchot family. Our collection is used to support this mission through education, research, and rotating exhibitions.

Much of our collection is on display in five historically kept rooms within the Mansion: the Great Hall, the Library, Gifford Pinchot's Office, the Sitting Room, and Gifford Pinchot's Bedroom. These rooms are furnished how they would have been during the height of Gifford and Cornelia Pinchot's' residence at Grey Towers during the 1920s-1930s. 

For more information about our collection, please contact the Curatorial Department.

 Grey Towers does not own the Pinchot Family archives, these papers were donated to the Library of Congress and finding aids can be accessed below. Our archival holdings contain early Grey Towers history, Pinchot family photograph collections, and early forestry pamphlets and journals. 

The papers of James W. Pinchot (1831-1908), Mary Eno Pinchot (1838-1914), and Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) are compiled together within the Gifford Pinchot papers, 1770-1972 available in the Manuscript Divion at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. You may access the finding aid to this collection below.

 The archival collection of Cornelia Bryce Pinchot (1881-1960) is available in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. You may access the finding aid to this collection below.

An additional survey was completed in the summer of 2024 to compile a list of archives across the country with reference to holdings of Pinchot materials, learn more below.