The National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum fills Leadville’s old Victorian high school with glittering gold, glowing minerals and a full-size replica of an underground hard-rock mine. It’s the only national mining museum with a Congressional charter, and it tells the story of the people and the minerals that built Colorado’s highest town and much of the modern world.

The museum moved into the former Leadville High School and Junior High building in 1988, the same year Congress chartered it and President Ronald Reagan signed the resolution. The original 1899 schoolhouse still shows off its Victorian architecture, joined over the years by wings added in 1943 and 1954 and a new front facade in 1994. Inside, the Hall of Fame honors the men and women who shaped the mining industry, from prospectors and engineers to inventors and a future U.S. president, Herbert Hoover. Leadville silver king Horace Tabor is an inductee too. The museum covers about 25,000 square feet, so plan on at least two hours.

Kids and adults tend to love the same exhibits. In the Prospector’s Cave, you walk through a cavern of calcite, pyrite and quartz crystals, then watch fluorescent minerals glow orange and green under ultraviolet light. The Hardrock Mine puts you underground with ore cart tracks, the sound of drilling and mannequin miners at work. The Gold Rush exhibit shows how the mines in Leadville’s California Gulch made the town a boom-and-bust legend, with real gold specimens, including gold from the Little Jonny Mine on Breece Hill. Other galleries cover the Climax molybdenum mine 13 miles north of town, Minerals A-Z and the many ways mined materials end up in toothpaste, computers and smartphones. A new gallery for Colorado’s 150th anniversary of statehood opened Aug. 1, 2026, tracing Leadville from the 1860 gold discovery to the silver bars of 1890.

Check the museum’s events and programs page for talks, family activities and Hall of Fame news. The new Colorado 150 gallery, which opened Aug. 1, 2026, uses historic photos and a short documentary to show how the old ore railway around Leadville became today’s Mineral Belt Trail. The museum’s Matchless Mine Historic Site is closed for the season from Labor Day to Memorial Day, but its story is told in the Matchless Mine exhibit inside the museum.