The Collection

An extraordinary journey of joy and determination, discovered beneath a few layers of tarnish.

The campaign for the women’s vote in Colorado was one of letters. Organizers traded views and information regularly in private letters. Many of those letters are now in History Colorado’s collection, offering us a behind-the-scenes look at the campaign - even a few things they might not have wished to preserve for posterity.

Beulah is a small town in Pueblo County, nestled into the foothills of the Wet Mountains. It inhabits a quiet, tranquil, and picturesque valley. But for decades during the 1800s, this otherwise idyllic valley wasn’t known for its gorgeous mountain views, its peaceful woods, or rushing creeks. Instead, it was notorious throughout the state as a hideout for bandits.

Working in a history museum, you run across some very interesting items in the collection. Some of them make you question their safety.

Hundreds and thousands of people pack the streets of downtown Pueblo. Colorful tents and booths line the sidewalk, selling everything from jackets and trinkets to pizza and popcorn. Food trucks sell meals to hungry pedestrians, and sometimes struggle to keep up with lines that stretch down the block.

Through the generosity and foresight of two Colorado women, History Colorado recognizes—with an annual awards program—those who’ve significantly advanced Colorado history.

History Colorado recently acquired the historical archive of the Colorado Dude and Guest Ranch Association (CDGRA) dating from 1933 through 2018. Formed in 1933, the association is a membership organization serving as a vital marketing resource, and, more importantly, as a system of self-regulation ensuring that Colorado dude and guest ranches are held to high standards.

History Colorado has been collecting, preserving, and interpreting our state’s history for 140 years. Our first collections were stored in a rented room at the Glenarm Hotel—the building that served as the state capitol in 1879.  Obviously, we’ve outgrown the Glenarm and three other locations since that time. We now manage more than 15 million photographs, documents, and artifacts. Considering the number of moves we’ve made, the number of sites and storage facilities statewide that we maintain, and the evolution of the documentation and tracking process—from cursive ledger book entries to typewritten catalog cards to computer database records—it is not surprising that an occasional artifact (or a box of them) has been separated from its provenance.

For many years, museum organizations like History Colorado have taken responsibility for holding artifacts in the public trust. Though the objects originate at various points in history, institutions such as ours hold them in trust for the people and places from which they came.

However, sometimes objects fall outside of our mission and have little Colorado significance or storytelling value. The process of reviewing and removing items from our collection is known as deaccessioning. A healthy and necessary practice, deaccessioning allows museums to better care for the collections that have stories to tell, to reduce duplicate items, and to better maintain safe environments for the collections that remain.