Near Craig
It all started with a broken-down car. The dirty black Lincoln was sitting in a vacant lot in Elk Springs in 1949.
Lou Wyman had time to eye the vehicle while he was filling water barrels for a sheepherder’s camp. And he wanted it badly.
He handed over $15 and hauled it back to the family ranch near Hayden.
That was it. Collecting would rule the rest of his life.
Many thousands of antique cars and tanks and steam tractors and license plates and military helmets and mousetraps and lard presses and toy soldiers and saws and spark plugs and spurs later, Wyman still can’t stop himself.
The result is a new museum in northwest Colorado.
“People call and ask if I want something, and, of course, I’ll take anything,” the 73-year-old says as he grins and spreads his oversized hands out at the proof, arrayed in the Wyman Living History Museum, east of Craig. “There aren’t many things that we don’t have two of.”
Or maybe three or 10 or 100.
The museum is 8,500 square feet of wonders from other eras. But that’s just a sampling of Wyman’s collection. The museum is surrounded by historic buildings Wyman has also collected – a general store from the tiny town of Pagoda, a blacksmith shop from Walden, a barn built by his grandfather and a homestead cabin from Wyman’s property. And hidden in the draws and behind the hills, Wyman has hundreds of old farm implements and vehicles lined up in rows in the cheatgrass looking for all the world like parking lots frozen in rust and time.
“Some of this is junk, but some isn’t,” Wyman said. “My theory is that it might not be of much value, but sooner or later it might be good for something.”
To open the museum, Wyman retired from a lifetime of sheep, cattle and elk ranching. He got the blessing of his coffee-club buddies, sold most of the family’s 10,000 acres on the Williams Fork, created a nonprofit corporation and bought 300 acres along U.S. 40.
“A lot of people don’t realize just how much stuff is out there,” said Al Shepherd, a lifelong friend of Wyman’s, who helped him collect scrap metal decades ago and serves on the museum’s board of directors.
Wyman’s museum feels like one giant toy box as he lopes through it, pointing out this and that.
“We’re just gettin’ to the good stuff,” he says over and over as he moves from one display to another, including a World War I corner, a train exhibit and a wall devoted to license plates. The plates date to 1913, when car owners had to make their own plates out of leather.
The man who friends say could talk an elk out of its antlers has another oft-repeated statement: “A guy gave it to me.” And a third: “I’ve got a little story about that.”
The stories only enhance the oddity of the items.
A stuffed buffalo was won in a poker game and racked up a hotel bill in Colorado Springs when the gambler left it behind in a pricey room.
A behemoth steam tractor was driven from Denver to Baggs, Wyo., at 3 mph – over a period of months. The antique caboose tore out traffic lights and power lines on Colfax Avenue when Wyman was hauling it home from Denver.
Wyman twirls the tail of a brass elephant, which dispenses a cigarette. He cranks a cork squeezer, a sausage stuffer and a lard press – some of the many items he photographs and puts in the local paper every week so readers can try to guess what they are.
He gets a belly laugh out of a wooden toilet once probably used by President Teddy Roosevelt when he visited a nearby lodge. It warns users to “rise sharply from the seat” before rattling a handle that drops charcoal dust and coal ashes into the pot.
Wyman’s dream is not just to have old stuff sitting around for people to look at. He wants to bring history to life by having antique machines that operate and by having blacksmiths and other experts working at old-time crafts on the grounds.
He envisions having the road he built to the museum lined with antique haystackers. He has visions of a park with an antique bridge over a nearby pond. He has drawings on one wall of a community center he hopes to build next to the museum. He hopes to get more of the rusted autos and implements restored.
“I used to worry that they would sell all this stuff and it would be scattered 100 ways,” he says as he surveys his antique kingdom. “If I die before this is all put together, they will have a hell of a time, won’t they?”
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
ABOUT THE MUSEUM
The Wyman Living History Museum is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday. The museum is at mile marker 94 on U.S. 40 east of Craig. For more information, call 970-824-6346.
