George Rowe Museum

  Interested townspeople took over the schoolhouse building in 1960 and began to put together a collection of memorabilia from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, creating the Silver Plume Historical Museum which opened in July 1961.  Each summer since then many hundreds of tourists have visited its displays on mining, railroading, education, firefighting, and daily life in Silver Plume during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

More than any other structure in town, the schoolhouse symbolizes continuity with the past, since it has been in use almost continuously from Silver Plume’s boom town heyday to the present.  The museum was renamed the George Rowe Museum in 1970, commemorating one of the town’s leading citizens, himself a close link between Silver Plume’s present and past.  Until his death in 1979, George Rowe, an eighty-seven year resident, collected and preserved records, stories, and artifacts of the town’s history, of which he was so much a part.  His donations of antiques, mining tools, and old photographs form the basis of the museum’s collection, and his memories of early days in Silver Plume have been a most valuable resource in compiling the history of this town.  Other individuals and families continue this tradition and add their histories to the museum’s evolving collection.  Since 1974, People for Silver Plume, Inc. has managed the museum, maintaining the building, collecting historic artifacts and papers, preserving the history of Silver Plume and the memory of the pioneers who settled here.