For decades, early Rice County farmers found artifacts of a population who lived long ago. Archaeologists and ethnologists later ascertained the artifacts belonged to proto-Wichita tribes who lived in today’s central Kansas from the 1300s to the early 18th-century. Lyons news editors Paul Jones and Horace Jones, along with other researchers connected these proto-Wichita to the mythical Quivira sought by Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, and ultimately, the establishment of the Rice County Historical Society Coronado Quivira Museum. Once kept in the Jones’ brothers’ printshop and then the county courthouse, Quiviran artifacts as well as other items gifted by local collectors, their descendants, and Rice County archeological excavations, artifacts were stored in a city building and then during the late 1960s a former Carnegie library building. At the April 1985 dedication ceremony of the Coronado Quivira Museum, Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the U.S. Interior and author of Coronado books, praised the small town spirit in renovating a former library and expansion into today's museum.

Besides our core exhibits, the museum typically hosts traveling exhibits and also showcases museum artifacts in special exhibits