Pink Palace Museum

Memphis natural and cultural history museum built in the pink marble mansion of Piggly Wiggly's inventor

The Pink Palace Museum takes its name from the pink Georgia marble mansion that Clarence Saunders began building in the 1920s before financial ruin cut the project short. The city took possession and eventually opened the complex as a museum of Memphis and Mid-South natural and cultural history. The collection covers Native American prehistory, the cotton economy, the history of Memphis commerce (including a full-scale replica of the first Piggly Wiggly store), and the natural history of the Mid-South. The Pink Palace Planetarium presents regular shows.

The museum is well-suited to families — the exhibits are hands-on and well-maintained — but there is enough genuine depth in the historical collections to interest adult visitors. The Saunders story alone, told through the museum's business history section, is an entertaining piece of Memphis mythology.

things to do sight museum
A story
The Pink Palace was built by Clarence Saunders, the Memphis grocer who in 1916 invented the self-service grocery store — the concept he named Piggly Wiggly. He made a fortune, bought land in East Memphis, and began building an enormous pink Georgia marble mansion. Then he lost his fortune in a stock manipulation scheme and was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1923. The unfinished mansion and the land were taken by his creditors and eventually given to the city. Saunders spent the rest of his life designing a second house, which he called Cloudlands, and then a third, none of which were ever finished.