Rock Springs Historical Museum
Near Rock Springs, Wyoming
The Rock Springs Historical Museum occupies the old city hall building downtown, a handsome Carnegie-era stone structure that dates to nineteen fourteen. The building itself tells part of the story: it was built at the height of the coal boom, when the town had enough money and enough civic ambition to commission something that looked permanent.
Inside, the museum covers the full arc of the region's past: the Overland Trail and the stagecoach era, the coming of Union Pacific, the coal mining decades, the immigrant communities and their ethnic lodges and churches, the eighteen eighty-five massacre that the town went too long without confronting directly, the energy booms of the twentieth century, and the trona industry that now drives the local economy. The collection includes photographs, mining equipment, and personal objects left behind by families who came from forty or fifty different countries and stayed long enough to become Wyoming.
The museum is free to enter. It is one of the better small regional museums in the mountain West.
