THE Trip, THE Encore' :: Pahrump Valley Museum, Pahrump Nevada

Copyright 2013, CABS for Reflections From the Fence

We enjoy visiting the local museums while we travel, these small towns have great museums.  Kudos to the local residents for preserving your heritage and history.  We find they are passionate about their towns and their collections.

This museum (according to the information from one of the staff) was gifted with a collection of sculptures, this is just one, of many, something a bit different.

I took no photos inside the museum.  They do have one of the most impressive collections of Lincoln (as in President Abe Lincoln) memorabilia I believe I have ever seen. They also have a very impressive display, including videos and photos and more about the Nevada Test Site, aka Nevada National Security Site.  There is no way I understood most of the display, but, it was a recent addition to the museum and was well displayed, roomy, techy.

The museum has a very nice collection of buildings, old ones, taken from locations around Nye County, dismantled in some instances log by log and rebuilt at the museum site.

One of the buildings is the Raycroft Railroad Tie Cottage, built in 1947 as a vacation cottage for Ida and Jim Raycraft.  It was built from railroad ties from the Tonopah & Tidewater Rail Road (note: they don't need to use creosote on the ties in this dry climate, they just do not rot away.)  Here is a room from the Raycroft cottage:

Lots of mining was done in this area, the museum has buildings and equipment that were rescued from old mines.  Here is Man gaining entrance to a "Miner's Cabin".  The information we were provided with during our walk around of the grounds tells us that these structures (shacks as they called them in the literature) built for housing were easy to dismantle if they wished to move it on to another mine or cheap enough to just abandon.

Inside, cook stove and some kitchen necessities:

And, in the other corner, a bed (I hear all the ewwwwwwwwwwwww's, I said them too, shudder, shudder).   

Little Red Schoolhouse, in use as late as 1945, it is from Clay Camp, Amargosa.

Inside the one room school house, and yes, in that back left corner, there is a dunce hat and chair.

Some more of the unusual but, oh, so interesting, buildings would be the grain silos, two of them in fact.  They were built before 1957 at the Pahrump Ranch, and are built of redwood.

We gained some appreciation and understanding of the area by visiting the Pahrump Valley Museum.

By the way if you are on FB (the blue social media site) type in the name Pahrump Valley Museum in the search engine at FB.  They have a page and some neat history about  the Little Red School House, arriving at the museum in 2006 and the rehab of it.  They also list upcoming programs and speakers and such.

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