Having taken a good percentage of the public buildings from a contracting Outram and placed them safe on a hill above the town, the Taieri Historical Museum has plenty of society's institutions covered.
The former school has made its way up the narrow gravel road to the museum site, the Outram courthouse sits ready to judge offenders nearby, the Outram jail to lock up the guilty, the Outram Town Board building to run the town, and for births, deaths, marriages and Taieri-specific spiritual issues, there's the Berwick Presbyterian Church.
There may be no railway line left in the area, but an engine shed from the Mosgiel to Outram service - which ran from 1877 to 1953 - is on hand if one crops up.
All those buildings and more sit atop the hill next to Outram Glen, where the unique museum has been slowly growing since it began in 1976.
Taieri Historical Society president Neil Gamble said the facility was set up when plenty of Taieri's history was in danger of being lost.
The tiny Outram Town Board office is a more recent arrival, ending up at site in 2010.
It is such a small space, it is remarkable there was room even for the five or six board members who once used it for local government.
The courthouse is mostly as it was while in use, when Outram was the major town on the plain, and gold miners drifted through on their way to Central Otago.
The judge's bench is raised above the dock and the public gallery where townsfolk would have watched justice being served for what Mr Gamble said were ''mostly rural crimes''.
The courthouse is also full of a strange assortment of knick-knacks from the past, from a 1963 calender to a collection of elderly cameras.
Nearby is the quite remarkable wooden jail, with bolts and padlocks intact.
The school building also presents a look back in time, with blackboards and tiny wooden desks sitting as they would have been when the last child walked out the door.
Mr Gamble said the site, which opens on Sunday afternoons from October to May, with the church available for weddings, attracted a variety of visitors.
''We get younger fascinated by it, and older people who see something they haven't seen in years.''
The latter would surely include an early 20th-century electrical pumping station control board, with the sort of dials and handles that would not go amiss if you were planning to bring Frankenstein's monster to life.
Alongside, in the railway engine room, is Mr Gamble's father's wooden threshing machine, built in 1898 and in use on the Taieri until 1960.
To one side is a projector from the Outram picture theatre, which closed in the mid-1960s.
Mr Gamble said he had been president of the society for about 10 years.
''I just seem to have a great interest in things that happened in the past - the people, how they did things, how they farmed, how they lived.''
The museum was funded by financial members and by money from community trusts.
''It's quite a battle - we scrape along with what we get,'' Mr Gamble said.
