(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] After the 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] A 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 for ones, 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)