The Cripple Creek District Museum is a private, not-for-profit museum that was instituted to preserve the history of the Cripple Creek District. The museum was built in 1953. It's located in a former railroad terminal in Cripple Creek, Colorado called the Midland-Terminal Railroad Depot. The Cripple Creek District Museum is a series of three building with a total of six floors.
There are two Victorian apartments in the Cripple Creek District Museum. The museum also has maps, paintings, glass, children's items, china, Indian artifacts, furnishings, and mining memorabilia. The museum also has a photograph gallery, mineral displays, and an assay office. While most visitors are individuals or small groups, the museum also accept history groups and school group tours. These need to be booked in advance.
The museum has all sorts of information about the history of local families. Inside the museum are hundreds of family files that include scrapbooks, letters, newspaper articles and pictures. There is an Ancestry Register as well as city directories. Cripple Creek District Museum has large files of documents relating to miners such as birth records, baptism records, marriage records, and death and burial records.
In 2000 the museum was able to digitize more than 1,000 of the pictures it had in its archives. Portions of these archives and pictures can be found online on the museum's website. If visitors want a quality reproduction of a picture, the museum offers this service for $15 per copy. It takes about six to eight weeks to process these pictures.
Admission ranges from $2.50 to $5.00.
