Museum of Idaho

The Museum of Idaho occupies a handsome nineteen sixteen Carnegie Library building downtown, expanded several times over the decades. It functions as the de facto natural and cultural history institution for eastern Idaho. Permanent exhibits cover Shoshone-Bannock peoples, the Oregon and California Trail period, the railroad era, and the nuclear history of the Idaho National Laboratory.

The museum's nuclear exhibit draws visitors from across the country, using artifacts from EBR-One and SL-One to explain the twin histories of nuclear promise and nuclear danger that played out fifty miles to the west. Temporary exhibitions have ranged from dinosaur fossil displays to traveling Smithsonian shows. For a city of sixty-five thousand, the museum's scope is unusually serious.