The Good in Giving

What does a donation to Breckenridge History do? Here’s some of the work your contribution will support:

Education programs

In 2024, we’ve provided programming to 1,934 students so far. Our programs are interactive and support Colorado’s education standards, while keeping students engaged and helping them learn about their community’s history. In the summers, we partner with other area nonprofits and camps to provide field trips to our sites, and during the school year we take students out to our sites and meet them in the classroom. Some of our field trips have included multiple sites, like a trip with Summit Cove Elementary School to hike Iowa Hill and spend the afternoon at the Barney Ford Museum and Washington Mine and Milling Exhibit. We’ve provided programs at the Sawmill Exhibit for toddlers in the Timberline Learning Center’s Pinecone classroom, and programs at Summit High School where students took on a persona to argue for and against bringing dredge boats into town.

We also provide an after school program, which rotates between schools across Summit County. Started in 2023, the program has visited Silverthorne Elementary School and Dillon Valley Elementary School twice. We’ve also held programs at Summit Cove Elementary School and Upper Blue Elementary School. The program runs on Wednesdays because we heard from the community that the early release day is when childcare is most needed. We were one of the pilot programs through Project Thrive, a Summit Foundation and Summit School District initiative, which has now grown to include several nonprofit partners providing programs to all the elementary schools in Summit County. We have operated our program every week this school year and will continue to do so in the next semester.

All these programs are provided free of charge to our local schools and families. A sense of our history can help provide students with a connection to our community, and it helps them to see that people have come here and flourished, but also come here and struggled. They’re not alone in their journey here. We hope to continue to grow these programs in the coming years!

Free museums

From Ute history to the ski resort, you can learn about all things Breckenridge inside our free museums. At the Welcome Center Museum, you can view films about our past, spend time in an historical cabin learning about the Season of the Nuche, an exhibit designed by Aspen Historical Society, and learn all about the characters who make up the history of the ski area, from the banana man to the tooth fairy, and of course, the fastest man on skis. Just a short stroll away, you can hear the inspiring story of Barney Ford. Enslaved for the first 26 years of his life, Ford advocated for his own freedom before going on to become an entrepreneur and civil rights leader right here in Colorado. In fact, the museum is located in Ford’s 1882 home. A couple blocks away, you can visit the Edwin Carter Museum, another historic home. Carter began operating a museum in the same location in 1875,  and today it still houses taxidermy from Carter’s original collection, as well as plenty of newer updates.

Our staff loves to share their passion for history, which is why each museum is fully staffed at all of our open times. Our dedicated employees will take you on free hourly tours at the Ford Museum, share tales of our local wildlife at the Carter Museum, or help you discover the history behind the screens at the Welcome Center Museum. You can even come check in with our administrative staff in Alice G. Milne Memorial Park to learn about the renovation of two historical homes and how this park came to be. We love our history and we offer these sites for free so that you can call in love with it, too.

Preservation Projects

In the Broadway musical, “Hamilton”, they sing about the importance of “the room where it happened.” We are all about preserving that room. We are very lucky in Breckenridge that our history is all around us at any given time. When you’re out hiking on a trail, you might stumble across one of our preservation projects, like the Reiling dredge or Sallie Barber Ore Bin. Our museums live in the history they tell from the Edwin Carter Museum (celebrating its 150^th anniversary in 2025) to the Barney Ford Museum in Ford’s 1882 home, and the Welcome Center Museum inside and surrounding an historical cabin.

Our preservation projects range from large-scale efforts like adding a roof to the Jessie Mill to smaller projects like an upcoming effort to stabilize the punt near the Reiling dredge. Each of our historic sites has an important role to play in telling our history, and so we’ve created the Historic Resources Management Plan which highlights sites all around Breckenridge and explains their historical values and our preservation plans. We even have an interactive map which allows you to see exactly where these sites are located and learn about the history, including viewing historical photos.

Archival collections

Preservation isn’t just for sites. From historical diaries and photographs to Ullr Fest posters and oral history interviews, our history comes in many different forms. We take our role as keepers of these objects very seriously and have recently completed a new collections care facility in the Milne House to help keep these objects preserved for years to come. However, we also know that access is a very important part of preservation. The physical archives can be accessed via appointment with our Archives and Collections Manager, Kris Ann Knish, but we are also constantly adding the Breckenridge History Digital Archives. From this site, you can view and download hundreds of photos for free and listen to our oral history interviews. You can also read up on the historical buildings in town with the Town of Breckenridge Cultural Resource Surveys, see one of the oldest ambrotypes of French Gulch, and so much more! There are literally thousands of digital objects to look through!

 

Why does all this matter?

Our nonprofit’s mission is to enhance our community’s future by discovering, preserving, and sharing our diverse and extraordinary history. Our history isn’t one moment in time or one person’s perspective. It can be inspiring and infuriating. It can show people coming together and overcoming unbelievable hardship, like the winter of the Big Snow, but it can also show people dividing and trying to cast out members of the community. This history is our history. It is the good and bad of the place we all call home, the place where our students learn and grow. We want to show them what the past has looked like so they can shape a better future. Donations we receive go to continuing this mission and making sure we can tell a more complete story of our past.