Market House Museum: Packing Paducah’s history in a small space
Though small, the William Clark Market House Museum contains curiosities and artifacts tracing the nearly 200 years of Paducah’s history. From early vehicles to delicate works of art to documents and maps, the museum celebrates the people and events that turned Paducah into the largest city in the Jackson Purchase.
When you explore the with 4,000 square feet of rotating exhibits and displays, you can step back in time. Pay a visit to List’s Drug Store, faithfully recreated right down to the soda fountain and counter and the gingerbread Eastlake oak woodwork from 1877!
The museum also houses the city’s first motorized fire truck, a candy apple-red 1913 LaFrance. The crank-started fire truck replaced 17 horse-drawn fire wagons when it was bought second-hand from St. Louis in 1920. In its very first year, the new fire truck saved Paducah $3,200 in horse shoeing and feed! Also in the collection is a remarkably lifelike statue of Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, carved in poplar by a teen-aged boy, George Theobald.
As the name amply shows, the museum is housed in a former marketplace. The first Market House was a rustic affair built of logs, erected in 1836. That building burnt, and a second, partially of brick, was built on the same site. The market house was briefly turned into a hospital to treat the wounded from the 1864 Battle of Paducah, when Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest raided the city for horses, mules, ammunition and other supplies for troops bound for Tennessee. The second building was razed in 1904, and the current structure replaced it a year later.
The Market House Museum was installed in the central portion of the old Market House in 1963, although it didn’t accumulate enough artifacts to open to the public until 1968. (The Market House Theatre takes up the Kentucky Avenue end of the building, while the Yeiser Art Center is housed in the Broadway end.)
The museum has several artifacts relating to the founder of Paducah, William Clark, the famed explorer who, with Meriwether Lewis, led the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Ocean. Among them is an 1827 linen map that lays out Clark’s plan for the new town he was founding at the confluence of the Tennessee and Ohio rivers. The museum also has a painted Rococo porcelain vase with ormolu mounts that was a gift from the Marquis de Lafayette to Clark.
HelloMetro Tip: The museum welcomes school field trips from March through Dec. 20 each year. School tours get in for free! There are special hours for field trips or other group tours. Click here to contact museum personnel for more information.
Posted by Ivonne Rovira
