South Park Historical Foundation

Story

South Park City is an open-air museum located at the west end of Front Street in the town of Fairplay in Park County, Colorado. The museum is a historic reconstruction of a mining town from the days of the Colorado Gold Rush and the later Colorado Silver Boom in South Park in the late 1850s through the 1880s.The museum contains thirty-five authentic relocated buildings filled with over 60,000 artifacts that depict many of the economic and social aspects of life in a gold or silver mining town in Colorado in the late 19th century. Two of the buildings, the South Park Brewery and the Summer Saloon, are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.A log structure known as "Father Dyer’s Chapel" was a hotel in Montgomery, Colorado but was dismantled, moved to Fairplay, and rebuilt as a church in 1868. It is named for John Lewis Dyer, the itinerant Methodist clergyman who preached in the area from 1861 to 1877 and is one of the sixteen founders of Colorado memoralized in the Colorado State Capitol in Denver.