Venue
Lafayette History Museum
The Lafayette Historical Society’s museum in the Lewis House, an 1890s coal miner’s cottage on East Simpson Street, called the Miners Museum until 2022. Open Wednesday to Friday mornings and Saturday 8 to noon.
· by the published hours
The museum is the Lewis House, an 1890s miner’s cottage built at the Gladstone Mine northeast of town and moved to 108 East Simpson Street between 1905 and 1908, which Elmo Lewis sold to the Lafayette Historical Society in 1976 on the condition that it become a museum of the town’s coal-mining past. It opened that year as the Lafayette Miners Museum and took its present name in 2022 to reflect a collection, now more than 4,000 objects, that covers farming, schools, home life and civic history as well as the mines. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places and stands across from the old City Hall.
Hours are Wednesday to Friday 10 am to 2 pm and Saturday 8 am to noon. The society’s site lists no admission fee. Groups are asked to call or email ahead. The society, an independent nonprofit, takes members and volunteers, researched the names on the new Lafayette Cemetery plaque, and runs Haunted History tours and a History Happy Hour, whose ticket pages did not load when this was checked.
At a glance museum · history · coal mining · volunteers
Checked November 2, 2026 against lafayettehistoricalsociety.org. Hours and phone numbers change fastest, so the business’s own page is the record. Report a correction
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In the guides
Read about Lafayette History Museum
- Explore Old Town Lafayette: six places in walking order
Park at the north end of Public Road and walk south: The Collective’s free gallery, a pub with 400 whiskies, the children’s museum and a bookstore cafe on Harrison, the coal miner’s cottage that is the history museum, Odd13’s taproom, and brunch across from Festival Plaza. About a mile, mostly flat.
- Lafayette: Mary Miller’s town, the coal mines and the lake
A farm platted into a town in 1888 by a widow who named it for her husband, a coal camp from the Simpson Mine to the Columbine massacre of 1927, a 1934 pool case that the City now commemorates, and a town of 2,600 in 1960 that is 30,000 today. The short history of Lafayette, with sources.
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