U.S. Marshals Museum

An ambitious project to build a national U.S. Marshals Museum is well underway. Located in historic Fort Smith, where the U.S. Marshals originally launched across the Arkansas River to hunt fugitives in the Oklahoma Territory, the museum will serve as a national center of heritage and legacy and will include 20,000 square feet of exhibit space. Designed by Cambridge Seven Associates along with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects, renderings of the museum show the building’s star-shaped design, along with its use of bronze, pays homage to the badges worn by marshals in earlier years. The U.S. Marshals Museum Foundation estimates that it has about $15 million left to raise for the project’s $60 million capital campaign. Approximately $8 million of that will be used to start production on creating the museum experience. California-based exhibit designers Thinkwell have created five permanent galleries: To Be A Marshal, The Campfire- Stories Under The Stars, Frontier Marshals, A Changing Nation and Modern Marshals. CDI Construction completed construction as of February 2020, and pending fundraising success, the museum will open in late 2020. (Updated 2 March 2020)