General Information
Visiting the Museum
Street Address
Nordic Heritage Museum
3014 NW 67th Street
Seattle, WA 98117
The Nordic Heritage Museum is located in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. Its
entrance is on 68th Street between 30th and 32nd Avenues NW. The museum is accessible
by Metro bus #17, which stops on 32nd Avenue. There is plenty of free and handicapped
parking for cars and tour buses in our parking lot in front of the museum on the
west side.
Museum Hours
10am - 4pm Tuesday-Saturday
12pm - 4pm Sunday
Our Gift shop is open for holiday shopping during normal Museum hours.
We are closed on Mondays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Easter
Sunday and New Year's Day.
Admission Prices
Adults $6
Seniors and college students $5
Children over 5 years $4
Children under 5 years free
Members of the Nordic Heritage Museum free
Tour prices can be found under School Tours or Adult Tours.
About the Museum
Mission
The Nordic Heritage Museum shares Nordic culture with people of all ages and backgrounds
by exhibiting art and objects, preserving collections, providing educational and
cultural experiences, and serving as a community gathering place.
Vision
The Nordic Heritage Museum is an internationally recognized museum and cultural
center where people of all backgrounds are welcomed to be inspired by the values,
traditions, art, and spirit of the Nordic peoples.
Permanent Exhibits
The First Floor
The Dream of America is the story of immigration told in an exhibit of life-like
dioramas. Travel with your family back to the nineteenth-century Scandinavian countryside
to begin the journey to America, starting with the move to the city. The voyage
continues as you board a ship to make the Atlantic crossing, and land at Ellis Island.
The adventure goes on to experiences in New York, and the expansion to the Midwest,
Great Plains, and Pacific Northwest, ending in Ballard. Here the growth and development
of a typical small Northwest community is displayed, complete with a post office,
church, drug store, blacksmith shop, and a family home.
The Second Floor
The Promise of the Northwest includes two galleries that focus on the logging and
fishing industries, which employed many immigrants who brought skills learned in
the old country. These galleries show the contributions of the Nordic pioneers to
the settlement of the Pacific Northwest. The Heritage Rooms display treasured and
useful items the immigrants brought with them, including folk costumes, textiles,
tools, and furniture. Temporary art, history, and heritage exhibits are housed in
the three galleries at the west end of the hall. Visit the
Current Exhibitions page
for current exhibitions.
The Third Floor
The third floor exhibitions illustrate the differences and the common bonds among
the Scandinavian people. There is one gallery for each of the five Nordic countries:
Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Each gallery highlights that group’s
special achievements in the Pacific Northwest.
Gordon Ekvall Tracie Music Library
Gordon Ekvall Tracie devoted over four decades to the study, teaching, enjoyment,
and promulgation of Nordic traditional music and dance. At his death in 1988,
Gordon bequeathed his music, dance and text collections to Skandia Music Foundation,
with the request that the collections be kept together and made available to the public.
That request was honored by the Foundation in 1993, with the cooperation of Marianne Forssblad,
Director of Nordic Heritage Museum, to which Gordon Tracie’s Estate materials were donated
and where those materials are housed. In March 1995 the Gordon Ekvall Tracie Music Library
was opened as a research archive of traditional Nordic music and dance, available to the
public at Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle.
Materials available in the Tracie Music Library
The Gordon Ekvall Tracie Music Library contains hundreds of audio and video recordings,
plus written documentation of Nordic folk and traditional music, dance, costumes, customs,
folklore and folk art – materials collected by Tracie from the 1940s through the late 1980s,
plus materials acquired by the Library since its 1995 opening. In addition to commercial
recordings from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, and other
countries, the collection includes more than 500 reel-to-reel original field recordings
made by Tracie in the Nordic countries during his numerous research trips, plus another
300+ reels documenting conversations, dance programs, presentations and radio programs.
Most of these important reel recordings have been transferred to archival digital audio
recordings and some material to archival compact disc as well. Audiocassettes of the materials
are available for Library users' listening. While many of Tracie's important field recordings
have been catalogued in detail into database catalogs, the on-going process of cataloguing
the extensive materials in the Tracie Library will continue for some time to come.
The Music Library also holds several hundred 33 rpm long-play records, 45's, and 78's,
as well as audiocassettes, digital audio tapes, audio compact disc recordings, films,
plus analog and digital video recordings. Additionally there are photos, negatives, slides,
exhibit boards, and posters, music and dance notations, and hundreds of texts and written
works. Like much of the commercially recorded music in the archive, many of the Library's
books, monographs, periodicals, sheet music, and dance notes are now out of print and have
become all the more valuable to researchers.
Among the treasures in the printed materials are writings by Gordon Tracie himself,
including his 1961 booklet,
The Folk Music of Sweden, commissioned by the Swedish Broadcasting
Corporation. Examples of his written output are found in scattered contexts, copies of which
have been assembled into compilations. The Tracie Music Library houses special collections of
materials from and about pivotal groups and personalities. Papers and artifacts document Skandia
Folkdance Society – founded by Tracie in 1949 – the group which has inspired much of the
traditional Nordic music and dance activity in the Pacific Northwest for over 60 years.
Also found in the Library is documentation of Nordiska Folkdancers, the original 1949
performing "Scandia Folkdancers" which Tracie separated from Scandia's recreational club
in 1952 (then known as “Scandia Folkdance Club,” later changed to “Skandia Folkdance Society”)
to designate the performing group "Nordiska Folkdancers." The Library also collects materials
and information about Nordic folk music and dance personalities of the Pacific Northwest,
such as Art Nation and the late Fiddlin' John Sears, plus international Nordic traditional
dance and music luminaries. Materials and records are also kept for Skandia Music Foundation,
founded by Tracie in 1970 as a sister organization of the Folkdance Society and a repository
and guardian for his material legacy. Today Skandia Music Foundation continues to participate
in funding the maintenance and operation of the Gordon Ekvall Tracie Music Library through an
endowment to Nordic Heritage Museum.
With Gordon Tracie's collection as a valuable and extensive base, the Tracie Music Library
has continued to acquire materials by donation, purchase, and commission, keeping the Library
a growing and updated archive. One of the Library's particular missions is the continuing
documentation of the Nordic folk music and dance scene in the Pacific Northwest.
The Tracie Music Library is located on the mezzanine level at Nordic Heritage Museum.
Because the Tracie Library is a research archive, materials may not be checked out but
may be used in the Library with Archivist assistance. With very few exceptions,
requested copies of Library materials may be made by Library staff for users' personal
study or non-commercial use.
Please contact the Tracie Music Library to make an appointment for a visit, for other
Library-service requests or for a list of current services and fees.
Please contact Archivist Mary Mohler for an appointment at
marym@nordicmuseum.org
or (206) 789-5707 extension 13.
Image above by J. David Lamb