The Petersen House Museum preserves a late-19th-century Queen Anne home from Tempe's territorial period, before the city became synonymous with Arizona State University and suburban growth. Its rooms and exterior details give a domestic scale to local history.
It is a small, appointment-and-hours-dependent museum, best paired with other Tempe history stops. The value is in seeing what prosperous desert-town life looked like before modern Phoenix spread around it.