(slow instrumental music) - [Abigail] South
Park City Museum tells so many stories, on a surface that tells
the story of many decades in the history of the
development of Park County. - [Linda] There's pieces
and parts of the history of each of these
little communities. - [Abigail] But in a
broader way it tells a history of historic
preservation in Colorado. You get to see a
collection of buildings that you couldn't
experience any other way. - [Harley] I think
we've got everything that a town used to have. - [Laura] You get to go
inside the buildings. You get to touch things
that the pioneers touch, you can lay in their beds. You can sit in their chairs - [Linda] You have a ghost
town that's still alive. - [Male Announcer] This
program was made possible by the history Colorado
State Historical Fund. - [Female Announcer]
Supporting projects throughout the state
to preserve, protect and interpret
Colorado's architectural and archeological treasures. History Colorado
State Historical Fund, create the future
honor the past. - [Male Announcer]
With additional funding provided in memory of
Deanna E.La Camera, by Hassel & Marianne Ledbetter, and by members like
you, thank you. With special thanks to
the Denver Public Library, History Colorado, The
Colorado Office of Film Television and Media and
to these organizations. (slow instrumental music) - Anybody who's heard of
South Park all over the world has that their own image
of what South Park is like. And it's not that far from real. (upbeat music) ♪ I'm going down to South Park ♪ ♪ Gonna have my self a time ♪ ♪ Famous faces everywhere ♪ In the South Park cartoon, Matt Stone and Trey Parker
latched onto that humor, that quirkiness that's
something different than anywhere else
you can think of and ran with it and
became quite successful. It does take a special
kind of person to be here. - [Laura] South Park is
this wide open Valley. That's surrounded by mountains. - [Linda] So any way you come
into the park is over a pass. It's a playground for
those who want to live and experience the natural
resources of this area. - You get the spirit of
South Park in your heart, in your blood, and you
don't ever wanna leave. - People were here
12000 years ago. This was a summer
hunting ground. And then a lot of different
native tribes came in regularly. - The Cheyenne, Arapaho, the... This was the ultimate
place to hunt. - [Narrator] These
hunting grounds and everything East of
the continental divide in Colorado was once owned
by France until 1803. When France sold the entirety of what was then
known as Louisiana to the United States for
a mere 4 cents an acre. Quite a bargain for what
would later become 15 States. This newly owned
piece of the country lured European
trappers and hunters who would name the
area for its bounty. Park comes from the
French word "parc" which was used to describe game and land preserves in the
12th and 13th centuries. - [Laura] South Park is
the Southern most park that the the trappers named,
there's also Middle Park which is near Granby and North
Park, which is up by Walden. - [Narrator] But a
different sort of hunter was also drawn to South Park. The gold miner.
- Park's peak at burst. At one time we had one-third of the population of
Colorado in Park County. Colorado's population
was 30,000, and Park County was 10,000 and they established
little towns. One was Tarryall. - Tarryall came from
the words, tarry - all, which they they thought that
there was so much gold there that anybody could come
up here and find gold. So they were telling
everybody just tarry here, and you're gonna get rich. Well turns out
that everybody came and they wanted to
Tarry there and get rich and all the land was claimed. - And so they got very
upset and they said Tarryall, well no,
you're not Tarryall, you're Graball. And so they decided to
come to the confluence of the middle fork of
the South Park River and Beaver Creek. And yes, they did find
gold there and they decided that we're gonna call
this Fair Play Diggings. So that was the first
name of this town. - [Laura] Over the years
that the name merged into just one word Fairplay, but then for a few years there they changed the name
to South Park City. And then after that, it
changed back to Fairplay. And that's what
it is still today. - They were still finding
gold in the creeks. Well, that won't make you rich unless you find Tom's Baby,
which is big hunk of gold. Here you find a flakes of gold
and it takes a lot of work. It's heavy. You have to keep
panning for gold. So you're always
panning to look for where do you think
the big gold thing is? And they did find
their veins of gold. Now you can start mining
as far as rock mining and have a better chance
of making some money. - [Narrator] Suddenly
there was a mining industry in South Park. And that brought the people who would feed and
clothe the miners. Then as more gold and silver
deposits were unearthed. The railroad saw profit in this hard-to-reach
hard rock outpost. - [Laura] So there comes
the Denver South Park and Pacific railroad
which came in 1879. Topped Kenosha Pass came down through Jefferson,
Como and Garo. And then the railroad also
in 1882, over to Breckenridge over Boreas Pass, and
then onto Leadville and the railroaders
support the ranchers as well as the miners. - [Narrator] With a
growing local economy and enough supplies to last
the winter by the 1880s more people finally started to
live in the area year round. This was previously
a daunting feat. - [Linda] The winds
here are ferocious. So trying to imagine what
it's like to stay warm, keep your family going
in that kind of weather. - You know, they
might have a fireplace in every room of their house. They didn't have a lot of
insulation in their buildings. It was cold and the
wind blew through and you'd chink your cabin
with whatever you have. It didn't keep the
cold out that well. There was no running water. There was no electricity. People wore a lot more
clothes in those days. I mean, layers and
layers of clothes. And they had their Saturday
night bath, but that's about it. So I don't think
people smelled as well as we might smell today. But they got by. - Life was hard. Nobody ever successfully moved
to Park County to get rich. I'd rather more than
the booms and busts that you had in some other
part, it was more a wave. The first around
of course was gold. But then as that
kind of drifted off and up on Musquito Range they found silver and then they started
working silver. And that was the next,
shall we say the wave. And that held until
the silver crisis. So that kind of busted. But all the time that
that is happening there's still guys that are
still working the little mines the small mines. They're still going
through with their burrows like the little
prospector and his burrow. And they're making enough
money to make a go of it. So as each mine
kind of played out you either found another
mine or you said, "I hear there's
a job over here." Buckskin Jo, which is
just South of Alma. Didn't last in the 1860s, there
was like 6,000 people there. And by the next year, nope, you had pictures of
the place abandoned because it was
someplace else to go. So you had that
flux all the time. - [Narrator] The 20th
century was not much kinder to the ebb and
flow of South Park. On the eve of World War II the train tracks were smelted
down for the war effort. But then when war broke out, the mines were called
upon once again, gold byproducts lead, tin, zinc were enlisted by
the US military. After world war II
ended this demand faded. And with it, the
surrounding towns. - [Harley] Through
mines closed down building set there being
vandalized and deteriorating. - [Linda] There were
all these little towns that had been built and
then left abandoned. - [Laura] The lawyer
from Colorado Springs came up here quite a bit. And as he was fishing in
these different valleys he would see all
these old buildings that were just going to ruin. - [Linda] Said, we ought
do something about that. - [Laura] And so it
was just like him and a couple of other
people that decided let's save these buildings. - [Narrator] The
lawyer, Leon Snyder had a sudden inspiration
for how to save the history of Park County. Create an outdoor museum. collaborating with local
residents and designers. Snyder began to bring his idea
to life in the early 1950s, he chose a plot of land in
Fairplay that already hosted seven intact historic
buildings worth preserving. The rest of the
property held the ruins of a fire from decades before - In 1873, a fire started and rampaged right
down Fourth Street. And actually it was
the Chinese workers bringing up buckets of water
that finally put the fire out. So this part of the
town was decimated. - A lot of what had
been here was destroyed. So Leon Snyder identified
this as an ideal location because he could
have a combination of buildings in their
original location combined with the buildings
that he could move in here. So he purchased this
land then for the museum. Leon Snyder went all
around the County and taking photographs of
buildings throughout the County evaluating them for their
potential to go into the museum. So he wanted to get different
types, different architecture. He wanted to get a collection
that would represent the various types
that you would find. He was also looking
from one mining zone, were they in condition
that they could be moved? There are certainly collections
of buildings like these across the US where
people have been concerned of disappearing resources
and moving them. I think what's
particularly unique here is they were so isolated. So they were kind of
even more at threat because of the isolation
on the mountain passes and even a harder
task to move them. The amount of work it took to
really move the buildings here is particularly unique. - It's amazing when I look at
some of the old photographs. - The Stage Stop,
two-story building it was up on near the
top of Musquito Pass. They moved it in the fifties
on a flatbed 1950s truck. I would have liked to have had
the lemonade stand for that. I would have liked to
have sold the tickets because I cannot imagine trying to get that
thing down, intact, they didn't pick it
apart and move it. They moved it down to here. So that would have
been phenomenal. - And it was only a
one-lane wagon road at that time in the fifties. So to move it out of there they had to bulldoze
a decent wide road. They had to cross the
Creek a couple of times that was probably one of
the most difficult moves. - Many of them were done intact as opposed to taking it apart, which you would
think would be easier just mark them and
put it back together. So they started rescuing
some of the buildings from all those little ghost
towns and mining camps and arranging them about like
the town would have been. - It kind of evolves from
the one end of main street where you intervened
to more established the type of buildings
you would find in town that were the ones
that represent the more kind of
permanent community. And then as you
move down the street you get into the
more kind of frontier the ones that would have
been in a more remote mining settlements. The ones that you would have
found out on Musquito Pass. - And when they started
actually working hard to make that museum
start to happen, people in Park County said, well, you're going to
have put stuff in there. And so most of the
artifacts that are here are from Park County. There's just a handful of things that came from somewhere else. - And that was part
of the motivation wasn't just to
preserve the museums, but also as old
timers, passing away, possibly not having family
in the area anymore. Being concerned that
some of those objects that were really key to the
history were being lost as well. And so huge collection of
artifacts within the buildings in South Park City
that were donated by local Park County residents,
huge community effort. Most of the buildings
here were either donated or sold at very low prices. The main expense was trying
to get the buildings here and repair them. - [Narrator] Through an enormous
Fairplay community effort, the museum came together
with a total of 22 buildings. Snyder decided to name
it South Park City Museum in honor of Fairplay's
earlier name. The opening was
timed to coincide with the Centennial of Fairplay. Along with the year celebration,
The Rush to the Rockies. - The Rush to the
Rockies came about as a way to celebrate kind of
be establishment of Colorado. Everyone who came out here
for the gold rush of 1859. So 1959 seems like
a great opportunity to really celebrate that. The museum opened in May, 1959. It was originally 50
cents admission for adults 25 cents for children. And they had 12,000 visitors that had come through by
September of that year, even got press from
far as way as a writeup in the New York Times. It was recognized as really
an outstanding museum and outstanding piece
of preservation. - [Narrator] Since opening, the museum has collected
more historic structures and in one visit, you can
experience life in Park County across hundreds of
years and many cultures. - We have collection
of artifacts here that displays the good
end of American culture that was here before the
mining camps pushed them out. The arrowhead, some of
them are from the culture but some of them
are prehistoric. As far as I know, they're all
found in the South Park area. This building is the Garo Cabin. This is from the town of Garo, which was located in between
Fairplay and Hartsel. It was built as a home,
a log cabin in 1895 and was moved to South
Park City in 1973. The exhibit in here now
represents the profession of washer women who were
staples in mining communities. They had the added bonus of when they washed
the miners clothes, the soap separated the gold
dust from their clothes and settled to the
bottom of the wash tub and they got an extra tip. This is the Trapper's cabin. This was originally
built in Levick which was a mining camp. Then ghost town. The building was brought
to the museum in the 1980s that's representative of
the early fur trappers, who were some of the first
Europeans to be out here. This building here is
the Homestead House. This was brought to
South Park City in 1959. It's also originally
from Levick. It was part of the opening
day celebration in May, 1959. This is an example of
what your average person would have lived in
with their family. Trying to make a start
in Fairplay in the 1800s. If you go inside, you'll
see just how small it is. This building here is
the Stage Stop Inn. This was moved from the
top of Musquito Pass which is in between
and Leadville. This two story structure
was moved as a whole. The whole building was
put on the back of a truck and moved down into the museum. This was also part
of the opening year. The Stage Stop Inn was
the only hotel available to stage passengers at
the top of Musquito Pass. The rooms are relatively
expensive, $3 a night. So if you could not afford that and you wanted a warm,
dry place to sleep you could pay to sleep on the
floor next to the wood stove. The school house was originally
built in Garo in 1879. It was moved to South
Park City in 1960. The Alma Queen mine
is a reproduction
of a hard rock mine. It's one of the only
structures in South Park City that is not an
original building. The head house is at the
top of the Hill here. This building was
moved from Levick and was originally
a blacksmith shop. The head house was a
locker room for the miners as they'd exit the
mineshaft for the day they were expected
to change clothes. So they couldn't take
any gold home with them but also to warm up and change into some nice
clothes to go home in. - [Harley] We have I think
everything that an old town would have had, we got two saloons, which most towns had
even more than two, courthouse, dentist's
office, doctor's office, drug store, bank,
railroad equipment. - [Narrator] The only building the outdoor museum still lacks is a Sheriff's
office with a jail. Happily there's
a nearby building that perfectly fills
this historic gap. Unhappily, it's constructed
of rock and weighs 80 tons. - Moving the rock building, it's a very challenging move. It's welded within a steel
angle irons all around it. So as to hold it together,
like in a steel cage to keep all the rocks together and you basically you've
got to shut down the highway because the only way
to South Park City is on Highway 9 to town. Power lines are in the
way, it has to be lifted. And we have to have
traffic control to keep people at
a safe distance because when you're
moving a building you're moving it very slowly, probably going
five miles an hour. So it's a slow process. Difficult things right
now that I'm having is what type of a foundation
we're gonna have to place underneath
this rock building? It's already been moved
with its foundation. So whether we need
to put something under the foundation
or another foundation, I don't know. - [Narrator] Once moved this
structure of rock and steel will bring the outdoor museum
to a total of 44 buildings and perhaps be its last. - I don't know that we could
move another building in here. This lot is the last piece
of empty property we have. - [Narrator] South
Park City was listed on the national register
of historic places in 2014. But not its
individual buildings, because most were moved and taken out of their
original context. Their preservation
was not considered to have been done using
proper modern methods. - South Park City is
designated as an outdoor museum as a significant museum from
the 1950s into the early 1960s. When Leon Snyder's original
vision for the museum was completed. When South Park City was
established and put together, it was really before the
real kind of establishment of the historic
preservation movement. They started preservation
didn't really become formal and codified until the National Historic
Preservation Act in 1966. And it established a framework it established the national
register of historic places. Basically in order to be
listed on the national register you have to both
have significance and you have to have integrity. And it's with those
areas of integrity that then the issue of moving
buildings really comes up. That's generally considered
that if you've moved a building you've lost integrity
of location. It's not in its
original location. You've lost
integrity of setting. Obviously South Park City
is a different setting than Musquito Pass. In many ways, the
integrity, a feeling of lost a lot of the feeling is tied
to the setting location. What happened in
a particular place and tied to the motivations
of why something was built as it was in a
particular location. Also often when
you move a building and sometimes materials
will be replaced. So you may lose some
associational materials and workmanship. Certainly when some of the
buildings were moved here they had to get new foundations new roofs, new windows, so there were some original
fabric that was lost as well. There's different roles for
different types of preservation. Without Leon Snyder and
the original establishment of the South Park City Museum. Most of these buildings
would no longer be here. They would not have survived. - Oh, they would have been gone. Yeah, they would've
been lost completely without moving them in. And we had pieces and parts out of all over the County
that didn't get moved. That are a perfect example
of what would have happened to some of the buildings
that are here now. - [Narrator] The entire
South Park region was designated a national
heritage area in 2009. These are places that
the National Park Service deems to be nationally
significant. Congress has only named
55 National historic areas and South Park City Museum
is at the heart of one, the conserves and preserves
1800 square miles. - I think a lot of people
find open-air museums are immersive in a way that
just walking into a museum or walking through a
historic district isn't. They provide a different
type of experience. - [Laura] You get to
go inside the building, you get to touch things
that the pioneers touched you can lay in their bed. You can sit in their chairs. - I mean, you go to a museum you don't see the
outside of the building. You don't see the
boardwalk out in front. You don't see the dirt street. - You get to kind of
feel like you're walking through the streets
of an old west town - If you look at
the drug store here all of the things in
there are authentic. They still have the
home cures inside. So things here are real. That's why as a
former travel writer I was just so impressed
with this place 'cause it's just a discovery. It's like you have a ghost
town that's still alive. Somebody is taking care of it. (bell dings) - I think just about every
one of these buildings here in South Park
City is at least a hundred or more years old. And so what we do every
year on a continuing basis is replace roofs, foundations,
doors, windows, you name it. - The preservation of South
Park City is really important. It tells so many stories on the
surface that tells the story of the history of
mining in Park County. And it's tells the story of
some of the original settlers who came and built the
buildings that we see here. But in a broader way
it tells the history of historic
preservation in Colorado and preservation efforts. It ties into kind of
a national fascination with the West and
Western history. It ties into our
Centennial celebrations. The Rush to the Rockies and the pride that Coloradans
have in that history. And it ties into a
history of development of Colorado as a
tourist destination and heritage tourist efforts. - [Harley] I would hope
that South Park City is here for another
a hundred years. (slow instrumental music) (upbeat music)
