Vermilion is a charming university town that is home to the University of South Dakota, and within the university the National Music Museum, housed in a former Carnegie Library on campus.

The collection is extensive, a superb collection of all types of instruments from original string instruments made by the masters of the 16th century up to the present day. An audio tour of the collection gave you both a description of the instrument you were viewing and a sample of the sound made by that instrument. For example…

This early 19th century piano is the kind that Beethoven or Schubert would have played. The beautiful painted design above the keys also extends to the bottom of the cover.

This beautiful 18th century organ was donated by one of the local churches; it is actually a reed organ but is decorated with a facade of pipes, as they were a much more costly instrument.

A roomful of stringed instruments from all of the most noted luthiers over the centuries could have have kept us there for hours more than we had time to spend a that NMM.

Adolph Sax, inventor of the saxophone, was a prolific inventor and instrument-maker, His instruments filled this cabinet and another (not shown).

The National Music Museum was started when a South Dakota bandleader and enthusiastic collector of musical instruments, Arne B. Larson, needed a home for the more than 2500 instruments he had collected. Since then the collection has grown to about 15,000 with donations and purchases. When generous donor gave $3 million dollars to acquire the collection of early Italian strings pictured above, it put NMM “on the map,” up there with some of the fine collections in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.

It was a glorious way to spend Saturday morning, and we could have easily stayed all day. Instead, we headed west to make it to Belvidere, SD to be in a good location to visit next Mount Rushmore and the Crazyhorse Monument.