What Is The Mining & Rollo Jamison Museums Website?

The Mining & Rollo Jamison Museums website is the official online home of a three-acre museum campus in southwestern Wisconsin that preserves the lead-zinc mining heritage and regional natural and cultural history of the Upper Mississippi Valley. The site is useful if you are planning a visit, want to understand what the museum offers, or are looking for tour and exhibit information before you go. Note that the museum is closed from November 1 through April 30, with the tour season running May through October.

What the museum is

The campus sits in the historic lead-zinc mining region near the world's largest "M." Its exhibits and interpretive programs are housed in several historically significant buildings and outdoor spaces:

• The 1845 Bevans Lead-Zinc Mine
• The 1863 Rock School
• The 1905 Hanmer Robbins School
• Outdoor greenspace, a pollinator garden, and picnic grounds

The museum's collection of regional mining artifacts and dioramas, founded in 1964, is described as among the largest in the Upper Midwest. Exhibits cover Mississippi Valley-Type lead-zinc ore deposits and how local mining led to Wisconsin's nickname as the Badger State. Cultural history displays represent the one-man collection of folk historian Rollo Jamison, with objects ranging from cigar molds and bull halters to hair wreaths.

What you can do on a visit

The core experience is a one-hour guided tour of the underground mine, reached by a 90-step incline into the 1845 Bevans Mine. Along the way, you pass through more than 100 years of local lead and zinc mining history, and a visit to the headframe shows how ore was hoisted to the surface and hand-sorted. Weather permitting, you can also ride in an ore car pulled by a 1931 Whitcomb locomotive that was used at the Blackstone Mine near Shullsburg until the 1950s; the train has carried more than 300,000 visitors since 1978.

Beyond the mine, you can explore indoor exhibit galleries, walk the outdoor grounds, and shop for rock and mineral specimens and regional-history gifts in the museum store.

What the website provides

The site functions as a visitor planning tool rather than an online catalog. Based on the homepage, it offers:

When to use it

Use the site if you are deciding whether to visit, checking whether tours are running in a given month, or looking for winter programming during the November–April closure. Because the homepage does not list prices, tour times, or booking conditions, confirm those details directly through the ticket and tour pages before making plans.