Exhibits at the three Philmont museums recount and interpret its rich historical past. They are open every day, and you will have opportunity to visit them either at the beginning or end of your trek. There is no admission charge.

Philmont Museum - Seton Memorial Library
Located at headquarters, the Philmont Museum houses history exhibits related to the Philmont area. The Seton Memorial Library is home to the personal art, library and anthropological collections of the founder and first Chief Scout of the Boy Scouts of America, Ernest Thompson Seton. The Gift Shop at the Museum carries a full line of Indian jewelry, Southwestern books, Pendleton blankets, drums, moccasins, and specialty items appropriate as momentos of your Philmont trek.

Kit Carson Museum
Philmont lies on part of a land grant given to Carlos Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda by the Mexican government in 1841. Mountain man Lucien Maxwell founded a colony on the grant on the Rayado River in 1848. A year later he was joined at the settlement by frontiersman Kit Carson. In 1950 the Boy Scouts of America constructed an adobe muse um at Rayado to serve as an interpretive area to portray its history. It was named in honor of Kit Carson.

Staff at Kit Carson Museum dress in period clothing and demonstrate frontier skills and crafts like blacksmithing, cooking, shooting, and farming. Each room in the Museum is outfitted with reproduction furniture and objects typical of New Mexico in the 1850s. The Rayado Trading Company, located at the Museum, sells books, maps, reproduction tools and equipment, moccasins, and blankets.

Kit Carson Museum is located seven miles south of Headquarters. Bus transportation to and from the Museum is available from Headquarters at 3:00pm each day. Tickets may be purchased for a nominal fee from the Camping Registrar. Large groups should schedule with Logistics Services before starting for the Museum.

Rayado is a certified site on the Santa Fe National Historic Trail.

Villa Philmonte
When Waite Phillips gave Philmont Ranch to the Boy Scouts of America in 1941, he included in the gift his palatial ranch, the Villa Philmonte. Philmont maintains and preserves the "Big House" as a memorial to Phillips and his generosity to the Boy Scouts. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Tours of the Villa may be scheduled at the Philmont Museum.