South Park City

Fairplay, CO has set up a wonderful area of town and made it into a museum of early pioneer days. It has about 35 buildings showing such things as a doctors office, newspaper office, railroad station, blacksmith shop, homes of several types, stagecoach inn, etc. In these buildings there is a most complete collection artifacts that I have seen in one area.

Take note of the picture above of some patent medicines. In the center is a cough syrup that if you take it you will be afraid to cough as it is also a laxative!
The collection of patent medicines in their drugstore is the largest in the country.
This wagon is a hunting wagon that they used for trips out to the hunting areas but, like campers today, they did not want to really "rough it"! It has a bed, stove, all of the things one would need to be comfortable.





Next we have something I found very interesting. It is a wagon full of logs that had been bored out by hand and then laid in Fairplay to be their water line from 1882 until 1960! I just am amazed at the amount of labor this represented and how their ingenuity won the day!






Each log is cut with a larger section in the inside of the one end and the other end is cut down on the outer side so that each log was able to nestle into the next long and make a leakproof connection.





This is a partial view of the buildings that are open for inspection to the lucky ones who take a moment out and stop to see. It is more than worth the $5.00 per person ticket!