Museum Club of Flagstaff to go on indefinite hiatus starting Monday

Citing hardships caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the historic Museum Club of Flagstaff, Arizona, will go on at least an indefinite hiatus starting Monday.

The storied bar and music club on Flagstaff’s east side along Route 66 made this announcement Monday on its Facebook page:

This is our last week open. It’s been a fun ride. I appreciate all of you and want to thank all of you from the bottom of my heart. The Zoo is nothing without all of you. The Museum Club will have another chapter some day: I just don’t know when … Last day will be Sunday, Jan. 3rd, 2021.

A message to the club went unanswered. But in a comment thread on the same Facebook post, the Museum Club hinted the closure may not be permanent:

Actually, the numbers and everything are fine and have been the last few years … the COVID stuff has been a challenge and at this point the current management has decided it’s best for the Museum Club and the Community to stop on a high note and wait for everything to stabilize. … there will be another chapter to the Museum Club … just don’t know when that will be … so, hiatus could be a way of looking at it?

This is the second time the Museum Club has shuttered in a little over three years. It closed with little warning in September 2017. Three months later, Ty Mount and Dru Douthit of Flagstaff purchased the establishment and reopened it in late December.

Built by taxidermist Dean Eldredge in 1931, the Museum Club once boasted nearly 30,000 items from his collection of stuffed animals, rifles and Native American artifacts.

It became a bar after the repeal of Prohibition and served as a recording studio through the 1950s.

The Museum Club earned enduring fame when Don and Thorna Scott bought it in the early 1960s and booked the likes of Willie Nelson, Wynn Stewart, Wanda Jackson, Waylon Jennings and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys as performers.

Although the Scotts met their ends tragically — her by a fall down the stairs, him by suicide — other owners continued to play up the Museum Club’s country-western roots through the early part of the 21st century.

UPDATE 1/3/2021: An update from the Arizona Daily Sun after it talked to Douthit:

He will be putting the Museum Club on the market by next week in the hopes that someone will purchase the Route 66 icon, allowing him to return to real estate, the career he left when he took on the business almost exactly three years ago.
He admitted that should it not sell, he may consider reopening in the summer.

(Image of the Museum Club in 2007 by Al_HikesAZ via Flickr)