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The Pioneer Memorial Museum ~ 300 North Main Street |
 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 literally 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 of Zion in the Salt Lake Basin.
The Daughters of Utah Pioneers, founded in 1901, is actively working to preserve the history and artifacts of its Pioneer ancestors. The Pioneer Memorial Museum is located at 300 North Main Street, in Salt Lake City, Utah. This museum has the finest collection of pioneer memorabilia in the Intermountain West. Paintings by noted Utah artists, guns, quilts, flags, furniture, books, hand-made clothing, and too many items to enumerate are found here. The museum is open to the public without charge.
The Daughters of Utah Pioneers maintain numerous satellite museums around the state of Utah and beyond. Click here for a list of other DUP Museums.
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The artifacts of the pioneers may surprise you. While the museum displays
plenty of necessary objects fastened 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.
