The museum is a two-story building with a facade of rock-faced, randomly sized, rectangular limestone blocks and end walls of rubble. The first-floor storefront is entirely glazed, with the upper stone wall and its four narrow round-arched windows supported by a lintel and four columns of cast iron. The apparently solid and heavy stone second floor above slender iron columns is visually unsettling. The museum houses the double-walled log jail of 1854, built so that, according to then-county judge Mayberry, “Coryell County can come into the modern age and stop chaining its prisoners to trees around the courthouse for varmints to chew on at night.”
The adjacent Burt Building, now a part of the museum, is a c. 1910 buff brick, two-story commercial building with Prairie Style traits similar to several contemporaneous buildings at the E. Main and S. 7th Street intersection.