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Small Museum - Big Stories

Welcome to the Moab Museum!

We are a cultural and natural history museum dedicated to sharing the rich stories of the Moab area. We are currently open Tuesday-Saturday from 10am-6pm. In accordance with Grand County requirements, masks must be worn while visiting the County-owned Museum building. We look forward to seeing you at the Museum soon!

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Special Exhibit

Hopi Katsina:

Evolving Styles, Enduring Meaning

If you’re visiting or live in the Southwest, you’ve likely encountered brightly painted, carved figurines in gift shops. To the average non-Native, “kachina dolls” are a beautiful representation of Southwest Native American culture. To Hopi people, however, Katsina is a religion and a way of life. A temporary Moab Museum exhibit and demonstrations featuring Hopi carvers offer a view into the cultural significance and artistry of Katsina.

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Moab Museum Blog

The Story of the Moab Museum

As Moab prospered in the late 1950s, civic leaders decided to establish a museum where locals and visitors could learn about the landscape, earliest life forms, indigenous peoples, pioneers, and prospectors. The Women’s Literary Club established the Southeastern Utah Society of Arts and Science as a nonprofit corporation in 1957 under which the Museum opened. A county facility became the Museum’s first home and featured the archeological collections of Dr. J.W. “Doc” Williams and Ross Musselman. By the mid-1980s, businessman and philanthropist Dan O’Laurie helped fund and construct the Museum’s current home that is named in his honor. Today’s Moab Museum remains a small museum with big stories.

Oral Histories

Kent & Fern Frost

Mitch Williams

Rolly Thompson

Dorothy Rossignol

Harold Provonsha

Billie Provonsha

Donna & Dale Oviatt

Mel & Ida Dalton

Bill Meador

Ferne Mullen

Clara Shafer

Deone Skewes

Ruby Zufelt

Pancho & Elsie Tabberer

Pete Byrd

Jack West

Edd & Isabelle Provonsha

Lloyd Pierson

Merv Lawton

John & Mary Keogh

Norma Blakenagel

Audry McDougald

Sam Taylor

Bill & Inalyn Meador

Maxine Newell & George Andersen

Banjo & Marion Holloway

Bill McDougald

See the Oral Histories

The Storylines:

The People. The Land. Today. Tomorrow

The People: Profiles

Lydia Taylor Skewes

“My people came to the little Grand Valley in wagons and forded the Colorado River, and I’ve flown in jet planes.” A daughter of one of the earliest families to settle in Moab, Lydia Skewes grew up watching Moab grow up...

See more People Profiles

Hidden Valley load basket

The basket dates to 885-1020 A.D. and likely was used by Ancestral Puebloans to carry items such as food and small children.

Buck Rogers Geiger counter

By the 1960s, radiation detection technology had advanced to produce an updated version of the 1950s Babbel Model 600A.

Read about the Uranium Boom

Wiren Femur

These hind leg bones belonged to a possibly 70-foot long sauropod weighing more than 25 tons. The femur had been buried in an ancient river deposit and migrated to water level in a modern river.

More about the femur

100 Million Years ago

At this time in the Cretaceous Period, much of western North America was inundated with a large seaway. Portions of the Colorado Plateau were repeatedly underwater during Earth’s long geologic history, as we see from the sediments and aquatic fossils preserved throughout the region.

See the paleogeologic maps