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 items related to the county's history, 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, which have been arranged on 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 opened as an exhibit in 1983. This was so successful that, in the decades afterward, several other historic homes as well as a few other buildings, including a print shop, a wedding chapel, a train depot, and the ticketing office for an airplane tour company, were also relocated to the Clark County Museum site.

These buildings could have been left simply standing in the relatively bare Mojave desert landscape surrounding the museum, but instead, most of the houses as well as the print shop were all organized along a paved street, with trees 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. The railway depot, the air tour ticketing office, and a few other buildings stand near the northeast end of the street, with some 19th-century buildings 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.