South Park City

Outdoor Historic Museum

Historic Mining Town, preserved in an outdoor Museum.

Created by Leon Snyder

Leon Snyder was a lawyer who visited Park County often on fishing trips. When he saw all the buildings that were abandoned due to the rise and fall of available work during the mining periods, he decided that the history and heritage of these buildings deserved to be preserved.

In the early 1950's, Snyder set to work on creating the South Park City Outdoor Museum. In order to preserve these buildings, he went all around the county taking photos of the abandoned buildings looking for various types of architecture, and assessing which buildings could withstand being moved to a new location.

The selected buildings were then moved, as whole buildings, on the back of a flatbed truck to their new home in South Park City, a stretch of land that Snyder had purchased to serve as an outdoor museum, showcasing these historic buildings.

The townspeople in Fairplay had expressed to Snyder that if he was going to have these buildings in the museum, he would need to put artifacts inside of them. This brought forth the initiative to fill the historic buildings with items that spoke to the time period, and set up a town as it would have been when the structures were built.

In May 1959, the outdoor museum officially opened. The museum received 12,000 visitors that year by September.

At this time, there were only 22 buildings within the museum. Admission was 50 cents for adults, and 25 cents for children. Since then, it has collected more historic structures, and consists of 44 buildings.

History of Fairplay

1803

The wide open valley that is surrounded by Mountains served as a summer hunting ground in which many Native tribes, including the Cheyenne and Arapahoe, came to claim their bounty. These hunting grounds were formally owned by France until 1803, when they were sold in the Louisiana purchase for 4 cents per acre.

The land attracted many European trappers and hunters who named the area for it's plentiful resources. Park comes from the french word "Parc" which was used to describe game and land preserves in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Gold miners were also drawn to South Park during this time, and at one point, 1/3 of Colorado's population was in Park County. Colorado's population at that time was 30,000, and 10,000 of those people resided in Park County.

1859

Those who migrated to Park County in order to mine for gold named the town "Tarryall", as it was believed that there was so much gold in the land here that anyone could come and they would find some.

However, when people arrived, the land was already cleaned of gold, and they were upset stating that "Tarryall" did not fit. It was more like "Graball".

From here, they migrated to the middle fork of the South Platte River and Beaver Creek where they discovered more gold. They decided, upon this discovery, to name the town "Fairplay Diggins". This was the first name for the town of Fairplay. At one time, the town was named "South Park City", like the historical outdoor museum, before the name was later merged into one word, "Fairplay".

1879

People were still finding gold in the creeks, however, this was not enough to make someone rich. Unless you found what was known as "Tom's Baby", or a very large nugget of gold. (Tom's Baby can be seen in the Denver Nature and Science Museum).

The gold seekers continued panning for gold until they found the "vein", or the origination point of the gold found in the creeks, and began mining in these areas. Suddently, there was a mining industry created in South Park. This brought in the people who would feed and clothe these miners in hopes of getting a taste of the wealth accumulated from the venture.

As more gold and silver deposits were unearthed, the railroad industry saw a profit to be made in this area. Denver South Park and Pacific Railroad was installed in the area, and expanded in 1882 to include Breckenridge.

1880's

By this time, more people began to live in the area year round due to the growing economy and ample resources to survive the harsh winters. However, this did not last long, as life was hard, and winters were harsh. The structures during this time did not have the insulation necessary to keep warm. As the need for gold and silver mining wound down during the silver crisis, people were forced to look for work elsewhere.

20th Century

On the Eve of WWII, the train tracks were melted down for the war effort. As war broke out, the mines were called upon once again, when gold byproducts such as lead, tin and zinc were enlisted by the military. However, after the war ended, this demand faded once more, and with it, the surrounding towns. Buildings were abandoned, vandalized, and left to rot.

In the early 1950's, a lawyer by the name of Leon Snyder, from Colorado Springs, began visiting the area often to fish in the springs. On these expeditions, he would often see the structures that were going to ruin, and decided that the buildings deserved to be saved.

In 1873, a fire had run rampant through what is now Main Street in the city of Fairplay. Workers were running buckets of water back and forth, and managed to put out the fire, but not before it decimated many of the structures along this path.

Leon decided that this was the perfect stretch of land for his outdoor museum. He and a few others set out to relocate the buildings to this land in order to preserve their history. Moving these buildings was no small feat. They moved the buildings as whole structures rather than tearing them apart and re-building. During this time, the roads were nothing more that one lane wagon roads. So in order to get the structures through, they had to bulldoze the roads into a path wide enough for the buildings to get through the rough mountain passes.