The Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals in Hillsboro is a major Pacific Northwest earth science museum housed in Richard and Helen Rice’s purpose-built 1952 ranch home on 23 wooded acres. Inspired by agates they found on the Oregon Coast in 1938, the Rices built an award-winning collection of minerals, fossils, gemstones, and meteorites, formally founding a museum in 1953. Opened as a nonprofit in 1997 and later becoming a Smithsonian Affiliate, it now holds more than 20,000 specimens. The house itself is also significant, noted for its craftsmanship and as the first ranch house in Oregon listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

North Plains, Oregon · USA