History and culture - Front Range
A free summer-only museum keeps Strasburg's railroad story alive
On the Adams County plains in Strasburg, the seasonal Comanche Crossing Museum gathers a 1917 depot, two relocated one-room schools, and thousands of everyday artifacts on a couple of landscaped acres.
Published June 10, 2026 - Last verified June 15, 2026
About 35 miles east of Denver, past the last of the suburbs, the plains open up and the town of Strasburg appears. It is an easy place to drive through without stopping. But just off the old highway sits a small museum that only wakes up for the summer, and it is worth a detour.
The Comanche Crossing Museum spreads across a couple of landscaped acres. The buildings were brought together here piece by piece: a 1917 railroad depot, a frontier-era homestead house, and two one-room schoolhouses moved in from the surrounding prairie, the oldest dating to the 1890s. Inside, the collection runs to thousands of everyday objects from area families, arranged into scenes like a general store, a barbershop, and a blacksmith’s shop.
The reason all this is here is the rail line out back. East of town, on August 15, 1870, a final spike on the Kansas Pacific closed the last gap in the first continuous chain of rails from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The museum keeps that story, and the volunteers who run it, going.
It is free, and it typically opens only in the summer months, with limited daily tour hours and an August town celebration. Because hours and dates shift year to year, confirm them first with the History Colorado entry on Comanche Crossing before you make the drive.