Esbjerg Museum runs the history of the area from prehistory to the present. The early rooms cover the Iron Age and Viking finds from the surrounding Jutland farmland — pottery, weapons, and the remarkable Tjæreborg amber hoard — and the upper galleries jump to the late nineteenth century and the founding of Esbjerg as Denmark's new North Sea port in 1868.
The exhibition on the boom decades after the loss of Schleswig is the highlight: photographs of muddy streets and half-built warehouses, ledgers from the first shipping companies, and a recreated 1890s grocer's shop. The museum is small, free to enter, and easy to combine with the central square and the water tower in a single morning.