Ohio River history museum built around a Silver Bridge disaster exhibit, with a salvaged eyebar
316 Main Street, Point Pleasant, WV 25550
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Donation-supported museum; admission and group rates are listed on the museum's site.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Indoor museum on Main Street
Equipment
Photos OK
Ohio and Kanawha River history · Silver Bridge disaster exhibit · Salvaged 1967 bridge eyebar
The Point Pleasant River Museum & Learning Center sits on Main Street in Point Pleasant, the town at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers in Mason County. Its galleries cover the river economy that shaped the town: sternwheel steamboats, boat construction, the recurring floods of the Ohio Valley, and the contribution of local river industry during World War II. The museum is Coast Guard certified and runs radar and boating classes, and it keeps a research library and a large aquarium stocked with Ohio River fish.
The museum's best-known exhibit covers the Silver Bridge disaster of December 15, 1967, when the highway bridge linking Point Pleasant to Ohio collapsed during rush hour and 46 people died. The exhibit includes a salvaged eyebar assembly from the failed bridge, the same component whose hidden crack triggered the collapse, along with a model and account of the event.
A fire damaged the museum building in 2018. The museum spent the following years rebuilding and reopened in 2024. It now operates Tuesday through Sunday under the Point Pleasant River Museum Foundation. Information here follows the museum's own site, the West Virginia Tourism listing, and the Wikipedia account of the Silver Bridge and its surviving eyebar.
Sources
The Point Pleasant River Museum is not promoted as a haunted site, and the museum itself frames its work as river history and education. For travelers tracing the darker history of Point Pleasant, the appeal is concrete rather than spectral: the museum holds a salvaged eyebar assembly from the Silver Bridge, the kind of part that failed in 1967 and dropped the bridge into the Ohio River, killing 46 people during the evening rush.
The exhibit pairs that artifact with a model and a record of the people who died, including the two whose bodies were never recovered. Visitors come to understand how a single hidden crack in one steel link brought down an entire span, and to see the wreckage up close. The museum treats the disaster as a memorial subject, not a thrill, and so do we.
Walk through exhibits on Ohio and Kanawha River history, sternwheel steamers, river floods, and the local river industry's World War II work. The centerpiece is the Silver Bridge disaster exhibit, which includes a salvaged eyebar assembly from the bridge that collapsed in 1967. A river simulator and an aquarium of Ohio River fish are also on site.
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