The Mining & Rollo Jamison Museums are pleased to announce the opening of our 2022 Tour Season on May 1. To thank the citizens of Platteville for their continued support, The Mining & Rollo Jamison Museums is excited to offer two community free days: season opening day, May 1; and season closing day, October 31. Museum admission, including a guided mine tour and train ride (weather permitting) is free to Platteville residents (proof of residency require). Reserve your spot today! Visit www.mining.jamison.museum/programs to register.
We have many programs and initiatives in store this year that celebrate human ingenuity, inquiry, enterprise, and development — what might be called the pioneering spirit. Perhaps the most important of these is a new exhibit highlighting the museum’s Native American tool collection —13,000 Years of Driftless Ingenuity. The exhibit tells a story of time and place, and how the cycles of each year informed different activities of survival and culture-building, based on Native American knowledge of the Driftless Area and the invention of new technologies using its rock, plant, and animal resources. The exhibit builds on a year of work behind the scenes with financial support from Wisconsin Humanities. Working with Driftless Pathways archaeologists, Museum staff members Rachel Vang and Sherri Hall analyzed, labeled, digitally cataloged, and organized more than 1,100 Native American stone tools both chronologically and typologically. Most of these were collected by Rollo Jamison, who deeply appreciated their historical significance but actually underestimated their age. He imagined they were 5,600 years old, but they actually span 13,000 years of human history. We hope you will come check out this and other new exhibits.
This year’s tour season brings the full complement of tours, including guided tours of the underground Bevans Mine, train rides, self-guided tours of interior museum exhibits, school fieldtrips, group tours, and private tours. The Museums are open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. from May 1 through October 31. We also offer a variety of virtual experiences for youth and adults.
The Mining & Rollo Jamison Museums are located on Main Street in Platteville, Wisconsin, in the heart of the historic Upper Mississippi Valley lead-zinc mining region. Founded in 1964, the museum is a nearly three-acre campus with scenic greenspace, the underground 1845 Bevans Mine, and a 1930s-era narrow-gauge mine train pulled by a 1931 Whitcomb locomotive. The mission of the Museums is to continue in the pursuit of excellence in the areas of regional and mining history. To achieve that purpose, the Museums are commissioned to be custodians of the past; to interpret the rich lead and zinc mining heritage of the region, as well as to preserve, interpret, and display the artifacts that define Southwest Wisconsin. Follow The Mining & Rollo Jamison Museums on Facebook @MiningJamisonMuseum and visit our website at www.mining.jamison.museum for more information on current and upcoming programs or call (608) 348-3301 or email Museums@platteville.org.
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