About an hour northeast of Las Vegas, the town of Overton guards one of Nevada’s great treasures: the Lost City Museum, a state museum built in 1935 by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps to exhibit artifacts recovered from local prehistoric sites.
The museum tells the story of the Pueblo Grande de Nevada, the ancestral sites whose significance archaeologists recognized a century ago, with excavations that began in 1924 and continued, off and on, until 1938. Inside, displays of pottery, tools and everyday objects bring the region’s first farming communities to life; outside, visitors can walk through a Native American pit house and reconstructed pueblos under the desert sky.
The museum, at 721 S. Moapa Valley Blvd in Overton, is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, with admission of $8 and free entry for members. Paired with the red-rock scenery of the Moapa Valley, it makes a rewarding, family-friendly day trip into deep Nevada history.
Photo: Ymblanter via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
