Back in Time: The Teton Valley Museum
A few weeks ago, we wrote a feature on the Jackson Hole Historical Society Museum. If you’re interested in local history or just looking for a place to kill some time with the kids, there’s another great local museum less than an hour’s drive from Jackson. The Teton Valley Museum is everything you want in a quirky, small-town repository of history.
This place isn’t some dusty room with a few yellowing photos—it’s a two-story, 10,000-square-foot time machine. This local museum has serious attic vibes, but it’s the attic of a really interesting person who’s seen some crazy stuff. The exhibits cover over two hundred years of history, capturing everything from extraordinary events to the everyday grit of pioneer life.
Kids will love the interactive exhibits. If you happen to have a four-year-old in her Little House on the Prairie era like we do, you’re in luck: You can climb inside a real tepee, hop into a covered wagon, walk through a real pioneer cabin, and ring an old school bell. You can even pretend to fire a World War II machine gun, though that’s admittedly less of a draw for the Laura Ingalls Wilder crowd.
Upstairs, three rooms are dedicated entirely to veterans, with photos and artifacts from the Civil War all the way to current conflicts. It’s a sobering and respectful corner of the museum that grounds all the fun with real historical weight.
Beyond the artifacts, the Teton Valley Museum also boasts a library of local history with nearly a thousand personal and family histories, plus thousands of digitized photographs. Whether you’re a genealogy geek or just nosy about other people’s great-grandparents, there’s plenty to dig through.
Next door, there’s a huge agricultural exhibit building where you’ll find a sheep wagon, a snow plane, and a healthy dose of old-timey farm machinery. There’s even a horse-drawn yellow school bus on skis—complete with a wood stove inside—because there’s nothing Idaho can’t put on skis. Also worth seeing: a tree that’s been dead longer than America’s been a country. It’s a weirdly sobering thought.
Bonus points: the Teton Valley Museum is run by volunteers and kept alive by community donations. This means admission prices are the opposite of Jackson resort prices.
Open
Tuesday—Saturday:
10:00AM–5:00PM
Memorial Day through Labor Day
Admission
Adults (13+): $8
Children (under 6 free): $4
Family (one household): $25
This post is brought to you by Flat Creek Inn.
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Ryan Kunz is a copywriter and freelance writer who writes on a variety of topics, including media, the outdoors, and whatever else strikes his fancy. To his five-year-old daughter who just read Little House on the Prairie, he's Pa Ingalls.
