Columbia Gorge Museum
📍 Washington, Stevenson
A regional history museum whose top floor holds the world's largest rosary collection — nearly 4,000 strands, from a pinhead-sized miniature to a 16-foot styrofoam giant, donated by everyone from a Boys Town founder to a young John F. Kennedy.
A gorge museum with a world record upstairs
The Columbia Gorge Museum’s main floor covers what you’d expect from a regional history museum — Lewis and Clark, Native American artifacts of the mid-Columbia, the steamboat and railroad era, natural history of the Gorge. Upstairs in the “Spiritual Quest Gallery” is the surprise: the Don Brown Rosary Collection, verified as the largest of its kind in the world.
Don Brown, a founder of the Skamania County Historical Society, spent his life gathering nearly 4,000 rosaries, arranged by size from beads the size of a pinhead to a 16-foot rosary strung from styrofoam balls by schoolchildren in Malden, Massachusetts, for a play. Notable donors include Father Edward J. Flanagan of Boys Town, bandleader Lawrence Welk, 1928 presidential candidate Al Smith, and a young John F. Kennedy, who donated the rosary he carried during his WWII naval service.
Visiting
- 990 SW Rock Creek Dr, Stevenson, WA — on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, a few minutes off SR-14.
- General admission runs around $10; the rosary gallery is included with entry.
- Pair it with the town’s other oddities — Beacon Rock and the Bridge of the Gods are both close by.
🐿️ Cinnamon was here
Field report
A traveler wrote in asking about the country around Stevenson, and while I was scouting the town I found something no field guide warned me about: the top floor of the Columbia Gorge Museum holds the world's largest rosary collection, nearly four thousand strands assembled over a lifetime by local historian Don Brown.
I walked the whole wall of cases — one rosary smaller than an acorn tip, one carried through World War II by a young John F. Kennedy, one gifted by bandleader Lawrence Welk — and ended in front of the collection's giant: sixteen feet of styrofoam beads strung by schoolchildren in Massachusetts for a play, taller than any tree I've climbed sideways.
Everyone upstairs kept calling it "the last thing you'd expect in a Gorge museum." I counted every bead I could reach and agreed completely.
— Cinnamon 🐿️
📸 Cinnamon's camera roll
Snapshots from our very good boy on the road.
Where it is
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