Burlington and the Carousel That Cost Its Buyers Their Jobs

Burlington started in the wrong place. In eighteen eighty-seven a man named Lowell laid out a town site a mile west of where Burlington now stands, on land he didn't own, in the wrong spot for the railroad. When the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific arrived, it put the depot at the current location, and everyone moved their buildings to follow.

Trains began running in eighteen eighty-eight, and the town was incorporated on January twelfth of that year. Burlington became the Kit Carson County seat. In nineteen twenty-eight, county commissioners purchased a Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel that had been running at Denver's Elitch Gardens since nineteen oh five, paying twelve hundred dollars for it.

Elitch Gardens had run the carousel every summer until then and had just bought a newer one. The price included the band organ and delivery by train to Burlington. That carousel, Philadelphia Toboggan Company number six, is now a National Historic Landmark: the only antique carousel in America still wearing its original paint on both the animals and the scenery panels, still giving rides on summer evenings at the Kit Carson County Fairgrounds.

It carries twenty-five standing horses and four chariots, plus a menagerie of burros, camels, giraffes, zebras, a lion, and a tiger. It became a National Historic Landmark on February twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty-seven.