Durham Museum at Omaha Union Station

The museum occupies Omaha's Union Station, the Union Pacific's first Art Deco railroad station, designed by Los Angeles architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood as a steel-frame structure clad in cream-colored glazed terra cotta; ground was broken on July 29, 1929 and the 124,000-square-foot building was finished on January 15, 1931 at a cost of $3.5 million. Union Pacific closed the station in May 1971 after the creation of Amtrak, and the building was donated to the City of Omaha in 1973, opening that same year as the Western Heritage Museum. A $22 million renovation, largely funded by Charles and Margre Durham, closed the museum from 1995 to 1996, and in 1998 it was renamed the Durham Western Heritage Museum in recognition of their contribution. On April 6, 2008 it became simply the Durham Museum, a change driven by partnerships with the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives that broadened exhibits and programming beyond western heritage; the museum is an affiliate in the Smithsonian Affiliations program. The station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2016.