The Salida Museum is open Wednesday thru Sunday , 12-4pm.
Admission: Senior $3, Adult $5, Kids $1
Colorado Day Free Admission
Thursday, August 1, 12pm-4pm. – Free admission
The Salida Museum will be celebrating Colorado Day by offering free admission to the museum. Bring your family and friends, tour the museum and learn about Salida History. You will be able to view the Railroad, Mining, Ranching, Native American and FIBArk exhibits, along with many other displays of local historical interest. We’re looking forward to seeing you!
Coming Soon – New Exhibit Panels
Neils Café for half a century served the railroad workers and towns people at 140 lower F Street. Neil and Mae Prunty owned the place and worked 16-hour days, six days a week to feed round-the-clock shifts of workers in the rail yard. When Army trains came through, Pruntys delivered 500 to 1000 hamburgers at a time to the depot. Cartoon characters of employees and frequent customers still grace the walls inside the building, which became Mama D’s restaurant and is now Senor Murphy candy shop.
A century-old souvenir poster attests to the efforts of one man to establish a free home for consumptives (tuberculosis patients) in Salida. Dr. T. D. Bancroft took an option on land near Salida but the towns people raised serious objections and the project eventually failed. Bancroft’s name was in all the newspapers as he solicited donations, traveling and lecturing throughout Colorado and as far west as Portland, Oregon for the 1905 world’s fair. He associated his work to cure the white plague of consumption with Lincoln’s cure of the black plague of slavery. The poster depicts drops of the martyred president’s blood from the night he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre.
Welcome to the Salida Museum
The City of Salida, Colorado, Heart of the Rockies, is in a prime location for many reasons and this is reflected in its varied and colorful history. The Salida Museum has a lovely collection of beautifully curated, local historical artifacts to help you explore the history of our area. The museum collection was first displayed in 1954 and has continued to grow and improve since then.
Explorers, miners, and ranchers were among the first to settle in the area, aided by an early agreement with the Ute Indians. Gold and Silver discoveries in the region in the 1870s caused the population to boom. More wagon trails were laid in to connect the mines with the Salida area for resupply as well as with markets on the Front Range.
Soon thereafter came the big push by railroads to reach the rich mining areas around Salida and to cross the rugged Rocky Mountains. Following a protracted fight on many levels to build track through the precipitous Royal Gorge east of Salida, the Denver and Rio Grande railroad arrived in Salida and the Upper Arkansas River valley in 1880.
1880 was a very busy year for our town! The railroad launched Salida into a period of rapid growth and was instrumental in helping it become a real community. First, many of the residents of tiny Cleora moved two miles west to resettle where the D&RG set up their work center along the Arkansas River. This new community was briefly named South Arkansas. Then, a few months later, the town was incorporated with the name of Salida. At this point it was called “The liveliest town in Colorado” by the Gunnison Review-Press.
Salida means exit in Spanish. Depending on your perspective, this is an exit from the canyon and the gateway to the mountains, or an exit from the mountains and the gateway to the eastern plains. In a perfect complement to the Salida Museum, downtown Salida is on the National Register of Historic Places and is Colorado’s largest historic district.