Updated: February 6, 2026

The Montana Historical Society is still located in Helena, across the street from the State Capitol, but its museum is now part of the new Montana Heritage Center campus.

The project combined a completely renovated historic Veterans and Pioneers Building with a brand-new 70,000-square-foot addition, creating about 165,000 square feet of space for galleries, programs, and research.

The Heritage Center officially opened to the public in early December 2025, after nearly twenty years of planning and about 107 million dollars of construction and renovation work.

Beginning in February 2026, staff are offering regular guided tours, with a larger grand-opening celebration planned for June 25-28, 2026.

People have lived on the land we now call Montana for more than 13,000-14,000 years, and the new Montana Homeland Gallery is designed to tell that very long story in an exciting way.

This gallery is about 16,000 square feet and is organized into ten "zones" that carry visitors from the Ice Age and the first peoples all the way to the present, including miners, ranchers, towns, and life during hard times like the Great Depression.

The Homeland Gallery also includes a special Sovereign Nations area that focuses on Montana's tribal nations, a Children's Gallery with hands-on activities, and a living-history area called Celebrate Montana where families can experience the past together.

The exhibit "Neither Empty Nor Unknown: Montana at the Time of Lewis and Clark" continues the important story of Native nations whose homelands the explorers traveled through on their way to the Pacific.

In the updated museum, this topic connects with the Sovereign Nations section so visitors see that Native communities were here long before Lewis and Clark and are still very much here today.

Changing galleries in the new building let the museum rotate different topics every year so that more of the collection can be seen.

The Society's famous Mackay Gallery of C. M. Russell Art has also grown inside the Heritage Center.

The gallery is planned to be almost three times larger than before, so it can show more paintings, sculptures, and stories about "Montana's Charlie" Russell, his wife Nancy, and the other artists who painted and sculpted the West.

Visitors can still see masterpieces like "When the Land Belonged to God" and the small but powerful "Waiting for a Chinook," which help them imagine what Russell called "the West that has Passed."

With more room, the new Russell Gallery can also explain how living in Montana shaped Russell's art and how his pictures changed the way people around the world pictured Montana and the West.

The Montana Heritage Center was designed to feel welcoming and interactive for students and families.

The new Children's Gallery gives younger visitors space to touch, play, and learn with age-appropriate activities connected to Montana's history and cultures.

In Celebrate Montana, visitors can step into recreated scenes, hear voices from the past, and try activities that help them imagine everyday life in different times.

The museum is open seven days a week most of the year, with weekday, evening, and weekend hours so school groups and families can visit when it works best for them.

The Montana Historical Society was first created in 1865 by the Territorial Legislature, which makes it one of the oldest state historical organizations west of the Mississippi River that is still operating.

Today, the Society's headquarters at the Heritage Center still include the museum, the State Historic Preservation Office, and a major Research Center with photograph archives, manuscript collections, and a library used by everyone from family history researchers to professional historians.

The Library and Archives reference room in the new building is scheduled to open to the public on March 17, 2026, giving students and adults even better access to original documents and images.

The Society also publishes the award-winning Montana: Magazine of Western History and books about Montana and the West, and it offers school programs, teacher resources, and tours to help people of all ages explore the state's past.