RESEARCH ARTICLES

When Art Leisenring purchased the house at 1340 N. Pennsylvania St. in 1958, Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood was at the center of the city’s queer community. Art primarily ran the home as a boarding house, with renters living in the basement, second, and third floors, and Art living on the first. Zoning laws in Denver…

On April 20, 1914, violence broke out in Ludlow, Colorado as miners on strike were fired upon by the Colorado National Guard and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The event came on the heels of months of contention between the two sides. Since the beginning of 1914, miners in Ludlow had been on strike…

In a time when the world was constantly changing, and rapidly, Titanic was a breath of fresh air that demonstrated the intense power of man. Coming in at 882 feet and 9 inches, the size alone was enough to draw over 100,000 onlookers when it launched on May 11, 1911, nearly a year before it’s…

Picture this: you are an archeologist exploring an ancient tomb in Egypt. You are navigating dark tunnels painted with inscriptions of Gods and the afterlife, until suddenly, you find yourself in the heart of the pyramid itself. The tomb of a long-forgotten elite of the Egyptian world. How do you know that you have found…

Simply visiting the Molly Brown House Museum is one way you can learn about Margaret “Molly” Brown’s incredible life, however, to gain a deeper understanding of how she lived and even what she held dear, you can view her private collections, The Brown Family Collection, online on the museum website. Looking into Margaret’s life, she…

Stained glass, prior to restoration Like many historical houses, the Molly Brown House Museum has restored many aspects of the home to its original beauty. In 2018, Phil and Jane Watkins, of Watkins Stained Glass, restored the original stained glass on the north façade of the house. As noted in a previous blog post, the…

Everyone who comes to the museum undoubtedly has their favorite room, favorite picture, or favorite artifact.  But what about the staff? We challenged our curator to answer this for Ask a Curator Day. We decided that our curator shouldn’t be the only one who got in on the fun, so we asked several members of…

The Molly Brown House Museum is home to many beautiful pieces of history that display a picture of life for the Brown family in the late 1800s. One original and extraordinary piece in the home are the stained glass windows on the north façade. While we are unsure of the exact original installation date of…

In 1932, after Margaret Brown’s death and during the Great Depression, what we know today as the ‘Molly Brown House Museum’ was sold to a private buyer. Throughout the years, various owners altered the house dramatically, including creating twelve separate rooms for renters and redesigning the appearance of the house to reflect modern styles.  In…

Wanda S., museum volunteer since 2008 When you meet Wanda, our spotlight volunteer, you will immediately be taken in by her warm personality and gracious manner. A volunteer with the Museum for almost 13 years, Wanda and her husband moved to Colorado to retire after time spent in Houston and their native Minnesota. Wanda spent…

Volunteering in America has a history almost as long as our country. Benjamin Franklin is generally credited with starting the trend by instituting a volunteer firehouse in Philadelphia in 1736. But volunteering likely predated him since people who cite Franklin’s gusto for communal fire fighting clubs say that he likely got the idea from similar organizations he…

One of the outlandish things that women in the Victorian era did was to adapt the cage crinoline as a way to achieve the sought after full skirt. Made of wood, steel, or horsehair, the crinoline was a stiff underskirt that made a woman’s skirt a force to be reckoned with.  While women reveled in…