Jeff. Smiths Parlor Museum

The Jeff. Smiths Parlor Museum is an early gold rush museum in the former parlor of Soapy Smith.

NPS Photo/A. Rogers

Quick Facts

Location:

Skagway, AK

Significance:

An early gold rush museum put together and maintained by early supporters and promoters of history and tourism in the area. 

Designation:

NHP and part of an NHL

Amenities

7 listed

Accessible Rooms, Benches/Seating, Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits, Information - Ranger/Staff Member Present, Junior Ranger Activity, Scenic View/Photo Spot, Wheelchair Accessible

Once called the “Museum of Why” by a ranger, the Jeff. Smiths Parlor Museum certainly inspires laughter, curiosity, and even confusion. That’s probably because it’s changed so quickly! Once the saloon of famous outlaw Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith, the building also served as the First Bank of Skagway, the Skagway Fire Department garage, a photo shop, and a series of restaurants. In 1935, the building was turned into a museum by Martin Itjen, a former stampeder and lover of all things eccentric. Itjen tacked on two additional rooms and patched up the building’s false front. Taxidermy, random eyeballs, and three animatronic manikins of Itjen’s own creation—Soapy Smith, Dangerous Dan, and Lady Lou, in reference the Robert Service poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”—pepper the space.  

George Rapuzzi, another longtime Skagway resident, purchased the building in 1963 and once again opened a museum, moving the building from its former location to where it stands now on 2nd Ave. He and his wife, Edna, in addition to adding an assortment of Gold Rush artifacts to the space, operated the museum until 1986. In 2016, the National Park Service reopened the museum as a testament to the evolution of a town, and more so, how collective understanding of a story is shaped by those who tell it – and what a story to tell! 

When Skagway began, it was a town full of people with a shared goal: to strike it rich. When the rush ended two years later, the vast majority of these people failed in that goal. The gold was gone, and as the stampede ended, the town was left with a question: what do you become when your original purpose – quite literally – disappears? How do we adapt in order to survive? The town had to engineer other ways to persist. Skagway developed its tourism industry, which still serves as its primary economic venture today. The Klondike Gold Rush story is a story of duality, of nuance. Each component comes together to create a complex narrative that we can learn from; by examining the past, we can work to create futures in which we all prosper, focused on values that drive us, much like the Golden Staircase, in an upwards trajectory. Let’s examine our surroundings, and in doing so, better learn to appreciate the “Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!” that we mine in the everyday. 

Learn more about the history of the Jeff. Smith Parlor Museum.