Director-led tour spotlights preservation needs and community donations at Rock Springs historical museum

Jennifer Messer, director of the city's historical museum, led a recorded tour of the museum housed in the former Rock Springs City Hall and outlined preservation work needed to keep the 19th-century sandstone building in use.

"This building was built in 1894, and it's all local sandstone," Messer said, describing how water exposure damages the stone. She said stoneworkers perform "point and tuck, route work" and that crews who worked on the B Street side have plans to work on the current section in the summer.

Messer emphasized the community role in maintaining the collection: "Everything that we have in the museum, and I mean every single thing we have, is donated." The museum has no budget to buy artifacts, she said, and relies on family heirlooms and civic scrapbooks for exhibits used in research and school tours.

The tour covered several of the museum's signature displays. Messer pointed visitors to a coal room filled with maps, equipment and material from local coal camps and to a large Mosler safe that remains on site because it is too heavy to move; she described the safe as a "gorgeous piece of late 19th-century architecture." Messer also showed the original jail cells and said, "for basically 100 years, we could hold about 40 people here," noting the facility lacked an on-site kitchen and historically contracted meals at roughly 50¢ per day according to available records.

Messer addressed local lore directly: while visitors often ask whether outlaw Butch Cassidy was jailed in Rock Springs, she said the museum "doesn't have any records that Butch was actually here." She also noted other historical anecdotes—Calamity Jane was jailed in Green River, not Rock Springs, and one person identified only as Cheney recalled an overnight stay that influenced their life, according to Messer.

The museum's fire station room remains "one of the most intact" spaces, Messer said, with grooves in the floor from the era of horse-drawn apparatus and an attic-driven hose drying system. She described a bell-alarm system that once served as the town's fire alert mechanism before radios and television.

Messer described ongoing efforts to improve access to the collection: volunteers and students from Rock Springs High School Academies photograph artifacts, record metadata and prepare items for upload so the database can be available online for researchers and the public at no cost. Messer said recent exterior painting and a brightened clock tower were part of prior maintenance work.

The tour also included a display of historic clothing and wedding dresses and emphasized the role of the railroad in bringing fashions and goods to the town. Messer repeatedly credited longtime local informants, including former councilman and firefighter Billy Shalata, for filling gaps in institutional records through oral history.

Messer did give two different years for the building's construction in the same tour (she first described it as built in 1894 and later referenced 1884). The museum's account of construction date is therefore inconsistent within the tour recording.

Looking ahead, Messer said masonry repairs are expected in the coming summer and encouraged viewers to use the museum's research services or visit in person. The tour closed with Messer and the presenter stressing the museum's community origin and educational value.