The Pioneer Memorial Museum

The Pioneer Memorial Museum is noted as the world's largest collection of artifacts on one particular subject, and features displays and collections of memorabilia from the time the earliest settlers entered the Valley of the Great Salt Lake until the joining of the railroads at a location known as Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

As you enter the Pioneer Memorial Museum, you walk back into history. Here are the belongings of a hardy pioneer people who migrated 2,000 miles west across the plains from Nauvoo, Illinois, and from all parts of the world to seek religious freedom and to build a great city in the Salt Lake Valley and surrounding areas.

The artifacts of the pioneers may surprise you. While the museum displays plenty of necessary objects fashioned out of the scarce resources available in Utah, the pioneers also leave a material record of remarkably ornate decorative arts. They carefully tended their luxury items -- as small and delicate as crystal salters or as large and cumbersome as pianos -- all the way across the continent. The museum displays many of these treasures that reminded them of "home" or their loved ones they were leaving behind. Also, pioneer craftsman were astoundingly adaptable to the materials available in Utah, making gorgeous pine furniture and painting it in a fashion that makes it look like more expensive wood, such as mahogany. Early Utahns also owned some of the finest goods available at the time, brought in either with ox team or by railroad later. From rugged, homemade utilitarian objects to elaborate Victorian decor, you can see the full range of the material record of the resilient pioneers at the Pioneer Memorial Museum.

Daughters of Utah Pioneers, founded in 1901, is actively working to preserve the history and artifacts of its Pioneer ancestors.This museum has the finest collection of pioneer memorabilia in the Intermountain West. Our collection includes paintings by noted Utah artists, pioneer portraits, guns, quilts, flags, furniture, books, clothing, samplers, a Conestoga wagon, medical and dental tools, a stagecoach, a 1901 fire engine, sewing machines, the original carved eagle from Eagle Gate, a coach from Yellowstone Park, articles associated with Johnston's Army, the Mormon Battalion, Nauvoo Legion, the Spanish American War, and many other fascinating displays. The museum also has an impressive collection of Victorian hair art, in the form of wall wreaths as well as jewelry.

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