Terry and I met Richard Fike, the founder of the Museum of the Mountain West on April 29,2009. (Yes, I’m way behind in writing blogs but we are spending so much time having fun and adventures that we haven’t caught up to making them blogs.)
Mr. Fike gave us a personal tour of the museum, which holds the memorabilia that he has collected for over 60 years. We walked down the street in the large building with storefronts, entered the shops and wished we could buy the items at the old prices. Mr. Fike played several old instruments with recorded music that played through paper or metal holes in his machines. I was most delighted by the violin, but the piano and bells sounds were melodious too. I could smell the dentist materials in the dentist office. The buildings, in the photo, were log cabins, a school, and what Mr. Fike called a teacherage. (It was a two- room brick building that housed the teacher when he or she was the teacher of the one room school.) Terry is seen here walking up to the church, which had painted windows. Buildings not pictured include 1882 Railroad buildings, the 1895 Carriage Works, a 1909 home, a 1933 log barn and a Chinese laundry with vintage washing machines. We were allowed in all the buildings during the two-hour tour.
You may not get a tour by Mr. Fike himself but you will be delighted by the displays as shown by his docents in this non-profit museum. We felt like we were experiencing life at the turn of the 19th century in the Montrose, Colorado area.
1 comment:
It's always fun to see those old parts of our history. However, the dental equipment looked very much like in the torture chamber I used to have to visit in California. Am I really that old?
Too often these days we see museums like this displaying historical artifacts and wondering if they got them out of our childhood homes -- or our own first apartment!
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