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In 1919, the Missouri General Assembly designated the first floor of the east wing of the capitol as the Missouri Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall and placed it under the care of the Adjutant General's office. Two year's later, in 1921, the Missouri Resources Museum was created on the first floor of the capitol's west wing under the Resources Museum Commission which was charged with the responsibility to collect and place on permanent exhibit examples of the products, flora and fauna of Missouri. The two museums were combined in 1923, and designated collectively as the Missouri State Museum under the management of the Resources Museum Commission.
Since 1923, the museum has been under the administration of a variety of state agencies. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources took over the museum in 1978. The museum contains long-term exhibits and regularly changing temporary exhibits. There is also a program that develops a series of traveling exhibits that can be used as educational tools by schools, civic and other groups.
The Missouri State Museum is responsible for a large collection of artifacts that consists of approximately 93,000 artifacts and objects from all aspects of Missouri history, natural history, and resources history that have been collected since the museum's inception. One of the highlights of the collection is the collection of over 125 Missouri Civil War battle flags. Thirty-three of the flags have been conserved and eleven have been framed.
