Sedona Heritage Museum

A one-room cabin, 1931

Walter and Ruth Jordan built a one-room cabin with a porch and carport on the property in 1931 and raised a family in it as the orchard grew around them. Ruth's mother, Fannie Woolf, helped fund a 1937 expansion, two bedrooms and an indoor bathroom, so she could spend Tempe's summer heat in Sedona instead.

The 1947 addition and the packing shed

After World War II, with materials and labor available again and the orchard doing well, the Jordans added a full kitchen, electric appliances, hardwood floors and a radiator system in 1947. The finished house, faced in red rock quarried locally, reached almost 3,000 square feet. A new 40-by-80-foot fruit-packing shed went up in 1946 to keep pace with the business; the older tractor shed, once used for packing, went back to storing farm equipment and still holds Mr. Jordan's tractors.

The orchard itself was the family's livelihood, not a hobby beside the house: everything from the packing shed's scale to the 1947 kitchen upgrade traces back to fruit sales, which is the thread the museum's "orchard industry" exhibit theme follows.

Selling to the city instead of a developer

Ruth Jordan wanted the property preserved rather than turned into housing. In 1991 the City of Sedona bought it using a bequest from the Stella Carruth estate, and in cooperation with the Sedona Historical Society converted the aging residential property into a public park and museum, which opened in 1998 [sedonamuseum.org, Museum Grounds]. The park and buildings are city-owned and leased to the Historical Society, which runs the museum today.

The packing shed is the building that explains the orchard business rather than just the family. Its walls are poured concrete faced in red rock; inside, the original apple grading machine still stands, the machine that let the Jordans sort fruit fast enough to truck four to seven tons of it to Phoenix markets several times a week, on top of the local trade that grew as tourists started arriving. Without a machine like it, an orchard this size could not have kept pace with a Phoenix delivery schedule using 1940s hand-sorting alone.

The home and the tractor shed carry the domestic side: original Jordan furnishings and personal belongings sit inside both, and Jordan family descendants still volunteer at the museum, the same continuity that got the property preserved in the first place rather than redeveloped.

The distinction matters for how you should walk the grounds: the packing shed rewards someone who reads the interpretive signs next to the grading machine, while the home rewards someone who wants a sense of what a working family's rooms looked like across three separate building phases, 1931, 1937 and 1947, under one roofline.

Groups get their own rate structure, self-guided or with a docent leading the walk-through; the museum asks that a group call 928-282-7038 ahead to arrange it rather than showing up and expecting a guide on the spot.

The research library is open to the public, but by appointment only, for genealogy work or personal and professional research into Sedona's history. It is not a browsing room you can wander into during the regular 11 am to 3 pm window without having called first.

The park added ADA-compliant restrooms and paved paths when the city converted the property in the 1990s, alongside the memorial orchard, bronze sculptures and picnic tables, which is why the grounds now serve picnickers and neighborhood walkers as well as museum visitors, not only people who paid the $10 admission.

None of this changes the core arithmetic of the visit: a solo traveler or a couple can walk in during the 11 am to 3 pm window, pay the $10 fee at the door and be done within an hour without calling ahead for anything. The appointment and phone-call requirements above only bind you if you are bringing a group or doing genealogical research, not for an ordinary visit.

The telegraph office: a surviving 1947 movie set piece

The one building on the grounds that was not part of the Jordan homestead is the telegraph office, relocated here in 2014. It is the last remaining structure from a movie set built in Sedona for John Wayne's 1947 film Angel and the Badman [sedonamuseum.org, Museum Buildings], a direct, physical piece of the era when Sedona's red rock scenery drew Hollywood westerns to town, which the museum's film-history exhibit covers alongside it.

The tenthouse: an early pioneer's mobile home

Added in 2007, the tenthouse is a museum-built replica of the collapsible, transportable canvas-and-wood housing early Sedona settlers used before permanent construction went up, built by museum volunteers with help from Sedona Charter School students. The museum calls it, not entirely as a joke, the original mobile home.

The memorial orchard and grounds

The 4.8-acre park around the buildings, Jordan Historical Park, carries a memorial orchard planted in tribute to the working orchards that once covered this stretch of Uptown, plus bronze sculptures, walking paths and ADA-compliant restrooms added when the city converted the property. It draws picnickers and neighborhood walkers as well as museum visitors, and it doubles as a wedding venue with the red rocks as a backdrop.

The current rotating exhibit

The museum runs a changing exhibit alongside its permanent themes; as of in Q3 2026 it is The Road Is Life: Sedona and Route 66. Check the museum's own events calendar before a visit if a specific exhibit is the reason you are coming, since rotating shows change on a schedule the museum sets, not one this page can predict.

The Agents of Discovery app, for families

The museum recommends downloading the free Agents of Discovery app before a visit; it turns the grounds into a set of short history-themed challenges tied to specific spots around the buildings and orchard, aimed at children who would otherwise walk through three historic rooms in ten distracted minutes. It costs nothing beyond the $10 family admission and works on a phone already in your pocket.

This is a small museum by design, not a compromise: three original buildings on a compact 4.8-acre park, not a campus.

From SR 89A in Uptown

Take the Jordan Road exit at the Uptown roundabout and go north on Jordan Road for three-quarters of a mile; the museum entrance is on the left.

From Oak Creek Canyon

Exit the roundabout onto Owenby Way and continue onto Schnebly Road, then turn right on Jordan Road and go four blocks; the entrance is on the left.

From West Sedona, via the Forest Road Cutoff

Turn onto Forest Road and follow it to SR 89A in Uptown, then turn left on 89A and take the Jordan Road exit at the roundabout, north three-quarters of a mile to the entrance on the left. The museum recommends this route specifically to avoid traffic at the Brewer Road and SR 179 roundabouts.

When the main lot is full

Use the Overflow Parking lot just beyond the main entrance: cross the bridge, turn left at the first driveway, then follow the walkway across a pedestrian bridge and up the hillside to the museum grounds.

- The buildings are not replicas. The red rock home, the tractor shed and the 1946 packing shed are the Jordan family's actual working buildings, not a museum's recreation of them [sedonamuseum.org, Museum Buildings]. - The telegraph office is a genuine movie-set survivor, the last structure standing from the set built in Sedona for John Wayne's 1947 film Angel and the Badman, moved to the grounds in 2014 [sedonamuseum.org, Museum Buildings]. - The apple grading machine inside the packing shed still works as a display piece and is the object that explains how a Sedona orchard could ship 4 to 7 tons of fruit to Phoenix several times a week in the 1940s [sedonamuseum.org, Museum Grounds]. - Jordan family descendants still volunteer at the museum, carrying on Ruth Jordan's role after the buildings passed to the city in 1991 [sedonamuseum.org, Museum Grounds]. - The grounds double as a wedding venue on the National Register of Historic Places, priced separately from museum admission and booked through the museum office directly [sedonamuseum.org, weddings page].

Give it an hour, mid-morning or mid-afternoon, on a day you are already in Uptown for Tlaquepaque or the Chapel of the Holy Cross; all three sit within a short drive of each other and none of them charges more than the museum's $10 door fee. It is also the obvious answer on a hot afternoon between two trailheads, since it is indoors, air-conditioned, and does not need a Red Rock Pass the way the Forest Service trails around it do. The pass and its rules are covered on the Red Rock Pass page.

The rest of the things to do in Sedona list ranks every stop, free and paid, by time needed. A hot midday hour is the single best reason to route through here: the three buildings are air-conditioned, the $10 fee is the cheapest paid stop in this cluster, and neither the museum nor its parking lot requires the Red Rock Pass that the trailheads around town do.