Colorado’s quirkiest museums: Enter the weird, wild West of pop-culture and history

Colorado’s cornucopia of weird, wild museums feels more bountiful than ever.

Even as tourists flock to name brands such as Golden’s Buffalo Bill Museum & Grave, they’re also drawn to Denver’s Forney Transportation Museum — which advertises its “unsettling mannequins” as much as its vintage, restored vehicles — or Colorado Springs’ ProRodeo Hall of Fame & Museum of the American Cowboy, which traces the Western impact of bucking broncos and their riders.

Social media-driven startups such as Five Points’ Culture Museum or the Denver Selfie Museum are also helping refresh notions of what public museums can and should be. Whatever their subject matter, the COVID-19 pandemic has made them as relevant and popular than ever, operators say, as people crave more than just digital screens for entertainment and shed the hermit lifestyle.

The 41-year-old Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls & Toys, for example, was still able to serve about 14,000 people last year, online and in-person, despite a move to a new building and spates of vandalism and theft during its ongoing renovation.

“It was a real bounce back, even though we went from being in a History Colorado building near City Park to a 1970s building right on Kipling,” said executive director and sole full-time employee Wendy Littlepage. “We lost the charming architecture but we also now have air conditioning, our basement doesn’t flood twice a year, and we’re doing construction to be ADA accessible.”

The internet supercharged the world of collecting in the 2000s, leading to an innumerable array of rare, personalized archives, both public or private.

But simply being niche or surreal does not a quirky museum make. Golden’s American Mountaineering Museum is laser-focused on its subject matter, accessible but insightful, and a visual delight. Five Points’ Black American West Museum & Heritage Center, currently closed for restoration, celebrates the fact that one-in-four American cowboys was Black, and the essential role of Black women as pioneers.

Are they quirky? Not really. We’re looking at things more like Grandpa Jerry’s Clown Museum, the Arriba-based, 3,000-strong clown collection that, for better or worse, closed in 2016.

Independent museums don’t have to be that way. But it helps when increasingly corporate, immersive installations are pawing at these nonprofits’ audiences. Surviving against one-size-fits-all commercial ventures means offering something the others can’t.

“We house one-of-a-kind photos, documents and artifacts,” wrote Michele Rozell, Cripple Creek’s director of heritage tourism, of the town’s Outlaws & Lawmen Jail Museum, via email. “We are exponentially short-staffed, but I do want to welcome spring breakers to my favorite facility.”

Long-running collections without homes continue to cling to their dreams. The Colfax Avenue Museum has been forced to shunt its unparalleled Colfax memorabilia and artifacts to different storage locations, following a flood at one of its public spaces and ongoing troubles in finding another.

The Colorado Computer Museum, a massive hardware assemblage that has been accumulating for more than three decades, briefly found a space during the pandemic, only to see it fall through.