As you saw on our front page, the purpose of this historical society is "is to offer lectures, seminars, and field trips that will help the community learn the history of Donner Summit and the surrounding area, and to collect and display artifacts relative to the history, and to carry on other educational and charitable activities associated with this purpose."

Our long term dream is to build a museum on Donner Summit so that everyone can enjoy the unique and interesting history of Donner Summit. Ultimately we'd like our museum to be more than a museum for the public and the community. We have a vision of a museum building also serving as a community center for the different communities on Donner Summit and maybe as a railway station. Stopping trains again on Donner Summit would connect us to the history - when trains used to stop on Donner Summit, and be a connection to responsibility for the future - energy conservation. A museum, train station, community center building or complex could also incorporate local businesses. Naturally that lofty goal will require a lot of work. There will be property acquisition, design, fund raising, display designing, machinery restoration (we have promises of various old machinery), contacts, etc.

As a start towards our goal we have opened our first small museum/visitors' center in downtown Soda Springs at the corner of Old 40 and Soda Springs Rd. Click on this link to look at it. Look too at the opening celebration. The museum at the blinking light in "downtown Soda Springs" has thousands of artifacts of local history. Its major strenght is thousands of old photographs of Donner Summit collected by Norm Sayler. They are arranged by subject in binders for easy viewing. There is also a television running with a slide show of dozens of old photos.

We have another museum as well that sit all along Old Highway 40 and nearby, our 20 Mile Museum extending from Auburn to Truckee. Check out the idea.