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The Polson museum has always presented to its visitors the values that everyone in Hoquiam cherished and adored and that is a deep sense of pride in its past and heritage. Since 1976, when the widowed Mrs. Polson donated her mansion to the city, the old home of the Polson family has been the caretaker of Hoquiam’s rich history and traditions.

The six thousand five hundred foot mansion was completed in 1924 and was Robert Polson’s wedding gift to his brother’s son Arnold Polson. The stately manor once stood by another more splendid home, the original Polson Mansion, which sadly is long gone and is now where the museum’s beautiful Rose Garden not sits.

The Polson mansion was rebuilt and refurbished with thirty three years of dedicated volunteer work and private fund raising. Each of the rooms offers a glimpse into the life and stature of the Polson’s with the photographs of the original fixtures and furniture’s gracing each room circa 1941. All throughout the museum a unique Grays Harbor sense of community and family is etched and shared with visitors.

The Polson museum also houses thousand of pictures and documents that record everyday life in Hoquiam and Grays Harbor in all different eras and periods. These priceless photographs give visitors a sense of time travel to Hoquiam’s vivid past, inadvertently sharing the lives and atmosphere of what was once Hoquiam’s city and harbor life with its people seemingly living on in infinite stillness.

Polson museum uses seventeen rooms to display its exhibits out of the twenty six rooms that the museum occupies. These rooms are used to display countless artifacts, documents, and photographs of the rich and colorful history of the Polson family and the community they belonged to. Among the displays are the Little Hoquiam Railroad in the logging room, historical exhibits inside the sports room, children’s room, a period costume room, and the stairway gallery. A favorite among children is the Polson’s daughters’ childhood doll house.

There is also the museum dining room where native artifacts are displayed, in the other rooms there is an extensive and valuable China exhibit , the Polson family exhibit and a remodeled 1920′s kitchen.

Another interesting addition to the Polson museum is the Rail Road Camp building that is being constructed and designed to reflect and mirror the beauty, substance and functional qualities of a hundred year old locomotive shed found a few miles north of Hoquiam, Rail Road Camp, to be found in the northeast corner of the Polson Museum property, it stands 80 by 40 feet. The cost of the building is $750,000 and is intended to be the home for the Polson Museums very wide ranging heavy-machinery collection.

The Railroad Camp building will also have on display a machine that is direct from Hoquiam’s logging and railroad past, a 65 ton Tacoma Steam Donkey that will sit atop a railroad flatcar with a speed track. There will also be pictures of early logging and railroad life giving tourist an emotional as well as genuine experience.