Heritage Street

The main building at the Clark County Museum in Henderson, Nevada, contains a nice but typical set of displays of the flora and fauna of the area as well as various items related to the history of the county (including vintage slot machines and other gambling machines).  However, the displays in the main building are not nearly as interesting as what stands outside.  For a few decades, the county has worked to relocate various historically important buildings to the Clark County Museum site, and these buildings have been arranged on a street named Heritage Street.

The first building to be relocated was the Beckley House, originally built in 1912 very close to Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas.  It was still standing in its original location in 1979 and was recognized as the last pioneer home in the area, but the site was slated for redevelopment.  To save the building, it was moved to the Clark County Museum, and in 1983, is was opened as an exhibit.  This was so successful that, in the decades afterwards, several other historic home as well as a few other historic buildings, including a print shop, a wedding chapel, a train depot, and the ticketing office for an airplane tour company, were also relocated to Clark County Museum site.

These buildings could have been left simply standing in the relatively bare Mohave desert landscape surrounding the museum, but instead, most of the houses as well as the print shop were all organized along a paved street, and multiple trees were planted around the buildings to make it feel suburban.  The southwest end of the street features a cul-de-sac with a commemorative gazebo at its center, and the chapel stands to the south of that.  The railway depot, the air tour ticketing office, and a few other buildings stand near the northeast end of the street, with some nineteenth century buildings are arranged along a “ghost town trail” behind them. 

Visitors can go inside most of these buildings, which have been filled with the types of furniture and other belongings that the occupants would have had several decades ago.  The other buildings, like the train depot, the air tour ticket office, and the chapel, provide information about how those buildings fit into the overall history of the Clark County area.  Hence, Heritage Street is a place where people can literally step into the past.