South Park City is an

open-air museum An open-air museum (or open air museum) is a museum that exhibits collections of buildings and artifacts out-of-doors. It is also frequently known as a museum of buildings or a folk museum. Definition Open air is “the unconfined atmosphere� ...

located at the west end of Front Street in the town of

Fairplay FairPlay is a digital rights management (DRM) technology developed by Apple Inc. It is built into the MP4 multimedia file format as an encrypted AAC audio layer, and was used until April 2009 by the company to protect copyrighted works sold ...

in Park County,

Colorado Colorado (, other variants) is a state in the Mountain states, Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It encompasses most of the Southern Rocky Mountains, as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the wes ...

. Open from May 15 through October 15, the museum is a historic reconstruction of a

mining Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef, or placer deposit. The exploitation of these deposits for raw material is based on the economic ...

town from the days of the

Colorado Gold Rush The Pike's Peak Gold Rush (later known as the Colorado Gold Rush) was the boom in gold prospecting and mining in the Pike's Peak Country of western Kansas Territory and southwestern Nebraska Territory of the United States that began in July 1858 ...

and the later

Colorado Silver Boom The Colorado Silver Boom was a dramatic expansionist period of silver mining activity in the U.S. state of Colorado in the late 19th century. The boom started in 1879 with the discovery of silver at Leadville. Over 82 million dollars worth of silv ...

in South Park in the late 1850s through the 1880s. The museum contains thirty-five authentic relocated buildings filled with over 60,000 artifacts that depict many of the economic and social aspects of life in a

gold Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile me ...

silver Silver is a chemical element with the symbol Ag (from the Latin ', derived from the Proto-Indo-European ''h₂erǵ'': "shiny" or "white") and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical ...

mining town in

in the late 19th century. Two of the buildings, the South Park Brewery and the Summer Saloon, are listed in the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...

. A log structure known as "Father Dyer’s Chapel" was a hotel in Montgomery, Colorado but was dismantled, moved to Fairplay, and rebuilt as a church in 1868. It is named for

John Lewis Dyer John Lewis Dyer (1812-1901), "The Snowshoe Itinerant," was a circuit rider, that is, a preacher who rode from one church to the next. He was a Methodist. Biography Dyer was born in Franklin County, Ohio, spending most his early years in Illino ...

, the itinerant

Methodist Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a group of historically related denominations of Protestant Christianity whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's ...

clergyman Clergy are formal leaders within established religions. Their roles and functions vary in different religious traditions, but usually involve presiding over specific rituals and teaching their religion's doctrines and practices. Some of the ter ...

who preached in the area from 1861 to 1877 and is one of the sixteen founders of Colorado memorialized in the

Colorado State Capitol The Colorado State Capitol Building, located at 200 East Colfax Avenue in Denver, Colorado, United States, is the home of the Colorado General Assembly and the offices of the Governor of Colorado and Lieutenant Governor of Colorado. History ...

Denver Denver () is a consolidated city and county, the capital, and most populous city of the U.S. state of Colorado. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. It is the 19th-most populous city in the Unit ...

. The museum was opened in 1959 after two years of preparation by the ''South Park Historical Foundation''. It is open daily from mid-May to mid-October. On the second weekend of August, South Park City hosts Living History Days in which volunteers in period dress perform the role of 19th-century townspeople. Living History Days romanticizes the vices of frontier America, such as playing Faro, which became popular during the California gold rush of 1849. It is illegal to play faro for money in all fifty states because the odds favor the players. Faro demonstrations will be conducted at Rache's Place Saloon in the park. The museum was listed on the

in 2015.

References

External links

{{Commons category, South Park City Museum
Official site
History of Colorado Open-air museums in Colorado Mining museums in Colorado Museums in Park County, Colorado Museums established in 1959 1959 establishments in Colorado National Register of Historic Places in Colorado