A sign off the new Central City Parkway promises “910 Comfy Slot Chairs!” but the electronic one-armed bandit is a little too newfangled for me. I prefer an attraction that’s been around the Little Kingdom since the previous boom, more than 100 years ago.
The Thomas House Museum looks much as it did in those days, but even more so, as if its inhabitants went out one day and somehow failed to return. Which is not far from the truth. A sign in the front yard reads: “A house frozen in time!” When I’m looking to escape, time travel works better than a slot machine.
Ben and Marsha Thomas’ cottage started out as a typical Central City house. One room, with a back door that opened directly into the side of a mountain, so that whoever lived there could work his mine without braving the elements.
In 1874, a kitchen, parlors and upstairs bedrooms were added. By 1897, when Ben and Marsha moved in, the place was more middle-class home than miner’s shack. Ben was a vice-president at Sauer-McShane Mercantile in downtown Central City, and his fortunes rose and fell with his town. By 1917, he was forced to move to Denver, but kept the house as a summer home.
After both Thomases died in the early 1940s, the house passed into the hands of two nieces, who visited infrequently and changed almost nothing. The house and all its contents were left to age naturally. In 1987, the nieces sold it as-is – kitchen cabinets still full of spices, mail still lying on the writing table, hatpins on the upstairs dresser.
And so the private life of Benjamin and Marsha Thomas, which is none of our beeswax, can be snooped on. For five bucks. This is an excellent thing to do with kids under 12, who pay nothing.
You can point out that Ben and Marsha were reasonably well off. Today, the whole point of that kind of success is to move into maximum square footage; to get winded by the trek from the media room from the home office by way of the master spa/bedroom/retreat. But Ben and Marsha favored the Victorian approach, cramming as much stuff as they could into claustrophobic parlors; overloading spindly tables with dainty bits of china.
No California King for them. They slept in narrow twin beds, where her tiny dresses and his prosperous-bellied long johns now continue on without them. Two chamber pots painted with pink roses and gold leaf sit beside these beds.
A hundred years ago, when you were well off, you no longer used a crummy discount chamber pot. You could move up.
Jim Prochaska, director of the Gilpin Historical Society, recently discovered that the
Thomases employed a housekeeper, which freed Marsha to be a lady of leisure. So what did she do all day?
“She wasn’t on the Internet, that’s for sure,” Prochaska says. Instead, she embroidered towels, stenciled ceilings, painted foreshortened chubby angels, wove her own curtains and twisted bits of human hair into intricate knots for display in shadow boxes.
Prochaska once received a small grant to study Marsha’s impact as an artist. “Our intern couldn’t find anything,” he says. “Did she ever sell her art? Display it? We don’t know.”
I suspect she wasn’t that good. But who needs another famous-artist museum, anyway? Instead, imagine raucous evenings in the Thomas parlor. On a good night, the guy with the banjo might stop by. (There’s a picture of him in the stairwell.)
Or picture Marsha’s housekeeper dusting the shelf full of ceramic statues of happy children sitting on potties. (Pharmaceutical salesmen distributed this sort of perk a century ago.)
These are not the details of famous lives, and a Big Tourist Attraction it ain’t. Since gaming was legalized, in fact, yearly visits to Ben and Marsha’s place have dropped from 6,000 to 1,200.
But there it still is, on Eureka Street, bypassed by everything.
In some small but important way, to visit is to win big.
Robin Chotzinoff is a freelance writer who lives in Evergreen.
…
The details
Thomas House Museum, 209 Eureka St., Central City, about 38 miles west of Denver via Interstate 70. Take Exit 243 (Hidden Valley/Central City) and turn right onto Central City Parkway, which becomes Nevada Street. Take a slight left onto Spruce Street, and then stay straight as it turns into County Road Street. Turn left onto Eureka Street. Entrance fee is $5 for adults; free for 12 and younger. Open Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Memorial Day to Labor Day.
For more information, call 303-582-5283, or visit coloradomuseums.org/thomasho.htm.
