A presentation of the Nevada Historical Society, High Noon with Neal Cobb is a monthly history series that delves into Nevada topics with local experts. Neal Cobb is a passionate historian and honorary curator for the Nevada Historical Society. Each month he is joined by a different guest presenter.

This month, Virginia ‘Ginny’ L. Lucas, curator and archaeologist, tells us about the Lost City Museum. Completed in 1935, the Boulder Dam Park Museum was built to house the artifacts from excavations at Lake Mead. The museum was originally located at St. Thomas before moving to its current location in 1935. The museum existed as the Boulder Dam Park Museum for 15 years. In the early 1950s, the museum was transferred to state control, and the name was changed to what it is today — the Lost City Museum. While several Civilian Conservation Corps crews worked on building the Hoover (Boulder) Dam, Ohio Company 573 and Company 538 were sent to excavate where the lake would ultimately form.

The Lost City Museum will soon celebrate its 90th Anniversary. While the building has had some additions through the years, it remains a place for people to learn about the indigenous peoples who lived and thrived in the Moapa Valley a thousand years ago. This presentation will showcase photos from the 1925 and 1926 Pageants, including video clips from the 1920s and 1930s excavations.

Lucas is originally from Lebanon, Tennessee, but she moved to Las Vegas in 2015, where she is currently a PhD candidate in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Department of Anthropology, specializing in zooarchaeology. She is the Curator of Archaeology at the Lost City Museum in Overton, Nevada. Virginia has worked and completed faunal analyses on sites in both the southeastern and southwestern United States. She also has codirected a field school in the Transylvania region of Romania. Currently, her research focus is on the subsistence practices of the Lowland Virgin Branch Ancestral Puebloans.

Register to join High Noon with Neal Cobb on Zoom. Recordings of past episodes are available on the library’s YouTube channel.