South Park City: Rescued from Disappearing
Near Breckenridge, Colorado
Near Fairplay in Park County sits South Park City, an outdoor living-history museum assembled from the ghost towns that were quickly vanishing across South Park's nine-hundred-square-mile alpine basin. In nineteen fifty-seven, a Colorado Springs attorney named Leon Snyder watched historic buildings being lost to fire, weather, and vandals and decided to save them. The South Park Historical Foundation acquired a site and began moving original structures here from abandoned camps across the region.
The museum opened in nineteen fifty-nine. Today more than thirty historic buildings stand on the grounds, furnished with more than sixty thousand artifacts. Everything from a dentist's office to a brewery to an operating assay office has been reconstructed from authentic components.
It is one of the most comprehensive preserved Colorado mining communities anywhere in the state.
