Since a new Jacksonville Museum is much in the news today, Historic Jacksonville, Inc. thought we would remind residents that a museum was a Jacksonville institution for 150 years from 1860 to 2010! Residents fondly recall visiting the last Jacksonville Museum and visitors regularly ask the Visitor Information Center’s staff, “Where’s the museum?”
The town’s first museum was housed in the Table Rock Billiard Saloon, constructed in 1860 at 165 S. Oregon Street. Saloonkeeper Herman Von Helms collected fossils and oddities to attract a clientele that then stayed for his lager. When the saloon closed in 1914, the Helms’ “Cabinet of Curiosities” boasted a collection of artifacts valued at $50,000. It encompassed “every possible manner of relic…mutely telling pages in the early history of Jackson County.” Highlights included the first piece of gold found in Jacksonville, a photo and piece of rope from a hanging, and the first billiard table in the Oregon Territory.
Subsequent museums were housed in the Brunner Building, the Bella Union Saloon, the U.S. Hotel, and what is now Jacksonville’s New City Hall. The current Jacksonville Museum proposal would include all of these sites, recognizing that the town itself is a museum—one easily accessed virtually today through apps that will allow visitors to explore specific themes or create their own tours with information about the buildings, the people, and their stories. Old City Hall, the oldest government building in Oregon that remained in continuous use, would be the starting point for sharing Jacksonville and its National Historic Landmark District with the public.