This year was an eventful one for the Museum (as always!). As part of our usual routine, we accessioned new items for our collections, which helps us meet our mission of preserving Park City’s history. Sign up for a membership to receive our newsletter, where you can learn about what’s in our collections! To meet our mission of promoting Park City’s’ history, we posted plenty of amazing images on social media, told some incredible stories in these Way We Were articles, and brought in tens of thousands of visitors to experience the Museum.
We featured several traveling exhibits throughout the year, including Graveyard of Buoyant Hopes: Ghost Towns & Relics of the American West, Two Minutes to Midnight and the Architecture of Armageddon, and The Perfect Shot: Walter Iooss Jr., and the Art of Sports Photography. These exhibits help to contextualize Park City within Utah, the American West, and the United States in life, politics, and culture.
Of course, we held our annual Glenwood Event, where the theme was Death and Disaster: Terrible Ways to Die! It was a beautiful day to bring the stories of those buried in the Glenwood to life. Summer tours of the Glenwood proved to be a popular program for the year as well.
In addition to the public Glenwood and Main Street walking tours, our members continued to fill up the spots on our historic hikes to our former mine sites. These unique and fascinating hikes are only available to our members and are worth membership by themselves.
We also continued our lecture series, and 2025 turned out to be our most attended year yet! We covered a wide variety of topics in Park City’s past, present, and future. To see what we have on the docket, head to our website. Our next lecture, on January 7 from 5 to 6 p.m., will be Who Was Lady Morgan? The Life and Times of Philip Morgan given by local author Michael O’Malley at our Education and Collections Center located at 2079 Sidewinder Drive.
In June, we highlighted Daly Avenue and Upper Main Street for our biennial Historic Homes Tour. Parkites and early summer guests were treated to nine beautiful historic homes, and one historic business. As usual, our annual historic preservation ribbons went out to celebrate our historic architecture, though we were thrown a wrench when Main Street had to close for a gas leak on the day of distribution!
Credit: Park City Historical Society & Museum, Bill Tafuri
Our Friends of Ski Mountain Mining History worked diligently to raise funds and coordinate work with our partners (a special thanks to Clark Martinez and his crew and the Utah DOGM) to finish the major preservation work on the Silver King headframe building. Work in 2026 will shift to completing major improvements at the Thaynes Mine headframe building, where the Skier Subway experience famously let out.
All this to say, we had a great year! And it would not be possible without our hardworking staff, our loyal volunteers, and our devoted membership! Thank you to everyone for supporting the Museum in 2025. We know 2026 will be even better because of you!
Get ready for our next exhibit, created by our team in house, which will arrive to our Tozer Gallery in March 2026, just in time for America’s 250th celebration. Titled Park City Loves a Parade! Our Parades, Processions and Protests from Past to Present, the exhibit will connect Park City’s sense of community to our public displays in times of jubilance, sorrow, and fervor.