Lost City Museum:  A Hidden Gem on Southern Nevada’s Arrowhead Trail

Part of the Lost City Museum’s 2025 Lecture Series:

Completed in 1935, the Boulder Dam Park Museum was built to house the artifacts from excavations at Lake Mead. The museum was originally located at St. Thomas before moving to its current location in 1935. The museum existed as the Boulder Dam Park Museum for the next 15 years. In the early 1950s, the museum transferred to state control, and the name changed to what it is today – the Lost City Museum. While several Civilian Conservation Corps crews worked on the building of the Hoover (Boulder) Dam, two crews were sent to excavate where the lake would ultimately form. The Lost City Museum will celebrate its 90th Anniversary in May 2025, and while the building has had some additions through the years, it remains a place for people to learn about the indigenous peoples that lived and thrived in the Moapa Valley a thousand years ago. This presentation showcases photos from the 1925 and 1926 Pageant as well as video clips from the 1920s and 1930s excavations.

Bio: Virginia is originally from Lebanon, Tennessee, but she moved to Las Vegas in 2015 where she is currently a PhD Candidate in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Department of Anthropology, specializing in zooarchaeology. She is the Curator of Archaeology at the Lost City Museum in Overton, Nevada. Virginia has worked and completed faunal analyses on sites in both the Southeastern and Southwestern United States. She also has co-directed a field school in the Transylvania region of Romania. Currently, her research focus is on the subsistence practices of the Lowland Virgin Branch Ancestral Puebloans.

Admission to museum – $6.00 for adults, free for members and children 17 and younger.