Arabia Steamboat Museum

This Kansas City museum displays the excavated cargo of a paddle steamer that sank in the Missouri River in 1856 and lay buried for over a century beneath a farm field as the river shifted course. Recovered in the 1980s, the astonishingly preserved cargo of dishes, tools, clothing, and even preserved food offers a time capsule of frontier commerce bound for pioneer settlements. Visitors watch conservators clean recovered artifacts amid parts of the vessel.