The Valdez Museum is the best place to put the town's setting into context. Its exhibits cover Alaska Native history, the gold rush route into the Interior, the Richardson Highway, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the 1964 earthquake, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
That makes it more useful than a standard small-town museum. Valdez has been rebuilt, shaken, moved, industrialised, and blamed for a disaster named after a ship that ran aground elsewhere in Prince William Sound. The museum helps explain why the town feels the way it does.