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Centennial Village Museum

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1976. 1475 A St. (northwest corner of A St. and 14th Ave., on the south side of Island Grove Park)
  • (Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

This reconstructed village emphasizes agricultural and ethnic architecture. Buildings moved in from throughout northeastern Colorado are arrayed around a central gazebo and gardens behind the frame Union Pacific Depot (1910), typical of those built in small towns across the West. The two-room beet workers' shack (c. 1920), board and batten with a slightly bowed roof, is typical of houses built by immigrants known as Germans from Russia, descendants of German farmers recruited to settle in the Volga Valley of Russia during the time of Catherine the Great.

The Wagon House (1917) is a 9-by-14-foot transition between a prairie schooner and a mobile home. A Swedish-American clapboard house (1909), an adobe outbuilding, an octagonal frame granary, and a replica stone house accompany the Italianate Hall House (1885, Robert Hall, builder) and the Queen Anne Style Stevens House (1900), a Sears, Roebuck mail-order house. The first Weld County Courthouse (1861–1863), a hewn log cabin from Evans, shows how unsatisfactory cottonwood logs were for building: as they dried, they twisted, bent, stretched, and wrecked the chinking.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Thomas J. Noel

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