Sunday, August 16, 2009

Ghost town

We took the kids to Old South Park City up in Fairplay, CO, yesterday. It's not technically a ghost town so much as a museum consisting of a small re-created city from the mid-1800s. You can check out a real one-room schoolhouse, a mine, a general store, etc. I found it very cool and educational, and the kids loved playing on the locomotive.

One thing that kind of freaked me out was that I had to explain technologies to the kids that actually existed within my lifetime but not theirs. "What's that?" they'd say with fascination about a freakin' typewriter. They'd also never met a bank teller nor seen a telephone that was mounted to the wall. So it's nice to know that the technologies I regularly used as a kid are now grouped together with the telegraph and the Gutenberg press.

Some of the stuff I really loved existed in the drug store, where they have lots of old "remedies" for various ailments. Check out the photo. There's something in there called "female cure." Got me curious.
Oh, and here is a box of surgeon's tools that a physician brought to the city in the 1850s. Ah, the days when you couldn't be a doctor until you owned your own bone saw.
Anyway, I recommend a visit. They sell some awesome sarsaparilla, too.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You know there still are bank tellers! Maybe the next outing should be to the B of A. You could kill two birds with one stone.