Wells Fargo History Museum

The Wells Fargo History Museum was a franchise of museums operated by Wells Fargo with its main and last museum located in its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California. They featured exhibits about the company's history. Some of the museums' displays include original stagecoaches, photographs, gold nuggets and mining artifacts, the Pony Express, telegraphs and historic bank artifacts. The museum was initially known as the Wells Fargo History Room when it opened in 1927 in San Francisco. In 1935 a museum was opened for public tours. The museum, which occupied two stories of the company's longtime headquarters, had been operating for nearly 60 years at that current location.[1][2]

Until 2020, when eleven of the museums were closed by Wells Fargo, it was a group of twelve museums operated in multiple cities in the United States.[3] The last museum at its main headquarters in San Francisco was closed February 28, 2025.

Exhibits

The museums at its headquarters housed a diverse collection of artifacts and exhibits that chronicling Wells Fargo's evolution. Visitors could climb aboard genuine Wells Fargo stagecoaches. The museum also showcased tools for gold mining, clothing, and household items from the Gold Rush period, as well as samples of gold nuggets from various deposits. Additionally, exhibits included models of 19th and 20th-century bank safes, working equipment, and samples of historical bank documents. Visitors could also examine items like the "dotchin," a portable scale used by Chinese miners to measure gold, and view enlarged sections of Eadward Muybridge's 1877 panorama of San Francisco's skyline.

Museum closures

In 2020 Wells Fargo announced it would be permanently closing all but one of its museums announcing that the "museums do not align with our go-forward strategy as a company."[4] and that "After evaluating our business and community strategies, we have decided to consolidate the program to focus on our San Francisco museum location and close the remaining 11 museum locations over the next 12 months."[5] The Wells Fargo History Museum in its corporate headquarters of San Francisco, California was the only museum to remain open.

Closed museum locations

• Financial Center in downtown Des Moines, Iowa[9]
• Three Wells Fargo Center in Charlotte, North Carolina
• Wells Fargo Center in downtown Los Angeles, California
• Wells Fargo Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota
• Wells Fargo Building in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Wells Fargo Museum (Phoenix) at Wells Fargo Plaza in Phoenix, Arizona
• Wells Fargo Center

Gallery

External links

• Wells Fargo History Museum