Thanks to the great historian Iván Nagy, on March 15, 1891 the Nógrád County Museum Society was established in Balassagyarmat. This was the 15th foundation of a museum in the 1870s, an era of creating museums and corresponding associations. The statute states that the purpose of the Museum Society was to "Find and collect what is most important in the historical, archeological, natural or ethnographical context especially related to Nógrád County”.