In May 2025, the Jefferson County Historical Society started the purchase process for one of the county’s most iconic buildings, the 118-year-old Methodist Church at 164 SE D St., to eventually house the county’s museum collection. Originally, the Jefferson County Historical Museum was established in the 1970s on the upper floor of the historic old County Courthouse in downtown Madras. Since 2012, the museum’s collection has been moved twice — first to the former Westside Elementary School and then to a secure storage site in late summer/early fall 2022, when the Historical Society began to raise funds to build a new museum.

In early 2025, when the old church became available, JCHS pivoted toward purchasing the historic building to house the county’s museum. The museum collection is crammed with historically significant objects, artifacts, records, photographs, and archival materials. Each item tells its own distinctive part of the story of Jefferson County from Native American times to the homestead and railroad-boom era, through the Great Depression and drought to the advent of irrigation, dam construction, light industry, and tourism. When updates on the church are completed, including making the building ADA-accessible, it will feature regular exhibit changes and interactive displays as well as permanent features, so you will be able to discover for yourself how people really lived in these parts in earlier times. A special attraction in the new museum will be a “Children’s Historical Playhouse.”

In addition to the museum, JCHS has an authentically furnished 1914 homestead farmhouse, a gift of the Farrell family of Gateway, located at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds. Nearby, visitors can go back to school in JCHS’ one-room country school. Adjacent to the homestead and school, lovers of old farm machinery can enjoy a fine collection of horse-drawn and early motorized implements, including a very rare, locally-built 1900s water-wagon, and probably one of the only horse-powered “stump-pullers” (for clearing fields of juniper trees) still in existence.