Contact

We are here to help you 

The Dewitt Museum is housed in the Sumpter Valley Rail Road’s western most depot in the town of Prairi City in the John Day River valley. The depot is on the National Historic Register. It was built in 1910 and was served as the terminus of the SVRR offering passenger and freight service ubtil the train stopped comming here in 1933. By that time the roads to Baker City had improved somewhat and it was quicker to drive an automobile.

After it ceased operation as the SVRR Depot, it was occupied for a time as a residence, but eventually it was abandonned and fell victim to the elements. Thanks to a community lead renovation in the eighties, it was reopened to house the Dewitt family collection.

The Dewit family was a pioneering family that settles in the valley of the middle fork of the John Day river, a few miles north of here near the historic town of Susanville. Naturally curious, the family collected many antiques and artifacts from the ealiest days of the region through to the mid XX century. When Pecha Dewitt passed in the 1960s, she left the collection to the city of Prairie City, to be available in perpetua to the residents of the city and the curious from every where. When the city first acquired the collection they constructed a building on Front Street to house it. After the depot was renovated, the collection was moved here in the 80s.

We hope you will com to visit us soon. Not only can you view the artifacts that were so important to the miners, ranchers and settlers of Grant County, we also have an extensive collection of digitized photographs of the people and places of that period. If you have ancesters from Grant County and would like to learn more about them, this is theplace to strat your research.

Please feel free to contact us: