The main street of Virginia City is essentially an outdoor museum. The original Victorian storefronts, complete in most cases with their original contents — hardware, dry goods, apothecary jars — have survived because the town was too poor to modernise after the gold ran out. The Virginia City Historic District is a National Historic Landmark covering the entire town centre.
The Virginia City Players at the Opera House have been running melodramas and variety shows every summer since 1949 — long enough to be a Montana institution in its own right. The Alder Gulch Short Line, a narrow-gauge steam railway, connects Virginia City to the Nevada City Open Air Museum a mile west. Nevada City holds an extraordinary collection of relocated frontier buildings and the Nevada City Music Hall, home to one of the largest collections of mechanical musical instruments in the West.
For context on the gold rush and the story of the Vigilance Committee, the Thompson-Hickman Museum holds artefacts and documents from the 1860s, including material on the execution of 21 road agents — among them the sheriff Henry Plummer — in the winter of 1863–64. The Vigilante story and gallows site are examined in a dedicated POI. Boot Hill Cemetery, just above the main street, holds the graves of many who came to the goldfields and didn't make it back.
Outside the town, Alder Gulch itself is walkable and gold panning is possible on public sections of the creek. The Madison River — one of Montana's finest trout streams — runs alongside the road north to Ennis and offers excellent fly fishing.