About the Museum

Established in 1974, the Museum of the Western Prairie reopened in 2011 following an extensive renovation. A property of the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Museum tells the story of the settlement of Southwest Oklahoma, concentrating on the decades from 1880 to 1920 spanning, in part, the Territorial Era and the Early Statehood Era. The collections housed in the 8,000 square foot facility include approximately 35,000 artifacts, 14,000 photographs, and 11,000 resource materials along with a reference library of 2,000 books and family history files.

Contributions

The Museum of the Western Prairie partnered with the Oklahoma Historical Society in 2021, placing a collection of 1,460 digital images on The Gateway to Oklahoma History. The images chronicle the construction of the W. C. Austin Project. Taken from 1940 to 1945 by a photographer from the Bureau of Reclamation, the photos are also dated and captioned providing a complete record of various aspects of the project that resulted in the largest gravity-flow irrigation system in the United States which continues to water over 50,000 acres of cotton each year in Jackson County.