As Park City Museum’s research, digital services, and social media coordinator, Dalton Gackle’s job is to manage the Hal Compton Research Library and keep track of historic photo requests and oral histories.

In doing so, Gackle helps the museum preserve and promote Park City’s history. He will continue that by giving a lecture called “Life About Town in Park City’s Mining Days” from 5-6 p.m. on Wednesday, June 22, at the museum’s Education and Collections Center, 2079 Sidewinder Drive. Although the event is free, registration is suggested by visiting parkcityhistory.org/events.

In addition to the lecture, Gackle will sign his new book, “Images of America: Park City,” which is coming out on June 20 and will be available at the Park City Museum, Dolly’s Bookstore and online at Amazon, and Barnesandnoble.com.

Gackle’s presentation will cover some of the topics in the book, namely Park City’s general and mining history.

“The lecture is only an hour long, so I don’t know if I will expand on a lot of what is in the book,” he said. “I might expand a little on certain mines and people.”

Gackle began writing the book in October 2021 after Arcadia Publishing approached the Park City Museum for a book that would be part of its “Images of America” series.

“While I hadn’t thought about writing a book like this, I thought it would be an interesting opportunity and a good way to showcase the museum’s image collections,” he said.

The museum’s executive director Morgan Pierce also thought the book would be a good idea, so Gackle took on the task that took nearly five months to complete.

One of the biggest challenges was deciding what to focus on because every book in the “Images of America” series is only 128 pages, Gackle said.

“You are limited in how many images you can run because you can basically do up to two per page,” he said. “So we had to find ones that would tell a great story and be interesting for people to look at. And I also needed to find images that showcased what I was talking about in the book.”

Gackle made sure his text touched all the major mines, such as the Silver King and the Ontario and minor mines, like the Nelson Queen, that made Park City famous.

In addition, he wanted to touch on the lives of the town’s historical figures — Thomas Kearns, R.C. Chambers, John Judge, John Daly and Suzanne Bransford Emery Holmes Delitch Engalitcheff, also known as the Silver Queen.

“I also wanted to talk about the town’s general lifestyle, including schools, churches and businesses,” he said. “So, again, narrowing down the images to coincide with all of that was difficult.”

Although Gackle is one of the expert historians at the museum, he did learn new things about Park City while writing the book.

“The main thing was figuring out the orientation of where all the mines are located around town,” he said. “Sometimes it is difficult to picture where these mines are on the different hillsides, unless you’re an avid hiker and hike by these mines all the time. So, I talk about the locations in the book to help people learn where they are.”

With this book under his belt, Gackle is open to writing another as long as it doesn’t interfere with his duties at the museum.

“This one did take up a lot of my time, but I did the work for the book as part of my job,” he said. “I would like to write another that starts where this one leaves off and include our skiing history, but we’ll see.”