MONTROSE — Richard Fike started collecting artifacts as a young boy in Valparaiso, Nebraska, helping his grandfather at the family’s Schmidt’s Cash Store.
He was 11 when he started a card catalogue to organize his growing trove of treasures.
“I started early,” says Fike, who was the Bureau of Land Management’s first archeologist in Utah and Colorado and spent 30 years with the agency.
Today, 85-year-old Fike oversees some 500,000 objects at his Museum of the Mountain West outside Montrose, including more than two dozen historic buildings he’s gathered from across the Western Slope.
LEFT: Richard E. Fike was the BLM’s first archeologist in Utah and Colorado before founding the Museum of the Mountain West outside Montrose in 1997. RIGHT: A Violino Virtuoso at the Museum of the Mountain West outside Montrose plays both a violin and piano with a small motor and electric magnets. (Jason Blevins, The Colorado Sun)
The collection includes a recreation of his grandfather’s general store, including the 1913 cash register. A fully intact saloon from the late 1800s features unopened whiskey bottles, a snooker table, a player piano and an extraordinarily rare Violano Virtuoso, a coin-operated electromagnetic piano and violin player.
The main building includes replicas of a drug store and dentist’s office from the late 1800s as well as the 1902 Holland’s Dry Goods store from Delta, complete with beaver-skin top hats. The collection stretches to the 1950s, with Wurlitzer jukeboxes and a vast assemblage of vintage toys, cameras, radios, books and household stuff.
The place pulses with history. It is a stroll through time. Visitors can easily conjure visions of bonneted moms buying bolts of fabrics and sacks of beans in the frontier general store and paying pennies for vials of potions and pills in the apothecary.
“For history fans like myself, this place is the purple Kool-Aid,” museum manager and historian Cindy Cindrich says, showing a visitor her favorite collectible. (It’s the upright Kalliope music box in the saloon, which, with a crank, spins a 33-inch disc that tinkles with harmonic bells.)
“Get your phone ready,” she says, cranking the tunes and opening the door to the whirring gears and pinging tones.
When Fike retired from the BLM, he had more than 30 storage lockers packed with his treasures. He opened the 6-acre museum in 1997 and soon began relocating historical buildings.
He’s got a 1909 bungalow ordered from Montgomery Ward, a blacksmith’s shop, the one-room 1889 Jutten Schoolhouse, a late-1800s hotel with a cherry wood bar from the Clipper Saloon in Telluride, an 1882 train depot and the 1895 Diehl Carriage House with a working forge and a gym where boxer Jack Dempsey learned to spar as a boy in downtown Montrose. The collection now includes 28 historical buildings, each meticulously rebuilt in the sagebrush prairie next to the trucks zooming by on U.S. 50.
The grounds are littered with rusting plows, tools, wagons and cars dating back more than a century.
More than 5,000 visitors a year roll through the museum, with Fike there to greet nearly every one of them. A placard on a display case by his grandfather’s store says the museum “is a boy’s dream realized.”
“It’s a requirement to pass this on,” he says.