Update: What’s happening to the Arizona Mining and Mineral Museum?

The status of the mineral museum can be summarized very succinctly as of July, 2011.

The Arizona Historical Society is destroying it.

The AHS is defying Arizona law which states that the mineral museum shall be preserved within the Arizona Centennial Museum building.  The mineral collection is being scattered across the state, and the AHS may be tossing the remainder of the mineral museum into dumpsters currently located behind the building.

Even the large, historic mining equipment outside the building may be threatened.  AHS centennial museum plans show it removed, and they will not answer questions about what will happen to it. This raises suspicion that it will be scrapped, because that will be the cheapest way to remove it.  According to AHS plans, all that will remain is a little 500 square foot mineral gallery on the west end of the second floor.

The historic and top rated mineral museum is being destroyed even though the $15 million Arizona Centennial Museum is not funded. Arizona will probably lose the historic and self-supporting mineral museum with its K-12 science education programs and have nothing but the shell of an empty building in its place.

The blog Mineral Museum Madness will continue to document the illegal AHS activity.

Note:

This blog has now been documenting the destruction of the mineral museum for over a year with 155 posts. For those lacking the time or inclination to read all the detail, a series of “updates” are included.  Simply reading the updates will familiarize the reader with the unfortunate story.

Prior updates were posted on March 27^th, January 6^th, and October 9^th. The original post on June 5^th, 2010 summarized how the misguided centennial museum law came into being.