Exhibits

This exhibit provides a look into the lives of early settlers with artifacts from the farming, pearl button making and timber industries as well as everyday household tools

While strolling down the lane, you may visit the general store, jewelry, pawn shop, mercantile, barber shop, dentist's office, doctor's office, print shop, optometrist office, bank, drugstore, post office and land office. There is even a town square which features period photographs of area main streets.

The Military Gallery holds a collection of American military and civilian artifacts as well as World War II German and Japanese military artifacts. The exhibits reflect successive conflicts from the Civil War through the Vietnam War.  

Teens living in the 1950s learned to dip, dive and jive to the raucous Rockabilly sound! Now, you can come and learn all about the music that grew up in your back yard.

The Arkansas Frontier brings the European exploration and settlement of Arkansas alive for children with multiple hands-on exhibits—and covertly engages kids in math- and engineering-based competitions that are fun for the whole family.

Kids role-play as they plan their own foray into the Arkansas wilderness. Assuming the imaginary guise of a farmer, a trapper, or a traveler, they buy supplies at a Trading Post with a ration of 40 coins; “shoot” wild game within a period-design bean bag toss (Try Your Luck); and spin the Wheel of Fate to “win” one of twelve good (or bad) fortunes taken from actual journals of early explorers in this region. Visitors can explore the workings of a gear-driven odometer powered by an authentic replica of a covered wagon wheel and match wits in a brand new graphing game.

Toddlers can play inside a life-size replica of the 17th-century canoe dug up at Toltec Archaeological Site in central Arkansas, push buttons to match songs and calls together with animals essential to life and sustainability in the early Arkansas wilderness, and dress in period-style clothing!

Portals of the Soul: Ancient Peoples of Northeast Arkansas is the current exhibition in the Native American Gallery. Portals of the Soul presents the story of Arkansas’s first civilization—the Native Americans who tamed this land thousands of years before Anglo-Europeans set foot in North America. Skilled artisans in prehistoric Arkansas painted and inscribed images of hands, eyes, serpents, crosses, and a host of other visually powerful designs in artifacts made of pottery, shell, copper, and stone. In concert with oral traditions still told by the living descendants of these ancient peoples, these images represent the mythical creation of the universe, its division into realms, and the very doorways, or portals, through which spirit beings traveled from realm to realm. The artifacts presented in this exhibition attest the great achievements of Northeast Arkansas’s native peoples.

Mary E. Stack was a native of Jonesboro, Arkansas who spent much of her life serving as a dietitian in the U.S. Army. During World War II she served in the Pacific and completed numerous other tours of duty. Throughout her travels Stack visited antique shops and auctions collecting, among other things, turn of the century furniture, snuff boxes, over 1500 thimbles, sewing scissors, lace-making bobbins, crochet hooks, knitting needles and hat pins. A sampling of these objects is exhibited in the Mary E. Stack Gallery.