Denver began in 1858 as two rival gold camps squabbling over a creek confluence. Three days trace that arc: 13,000 years of Indigenous Colorado, City Beautiful marble and gold leaf, and the Five Points blocks jazz built.
Colorado's state history museum (opened 2012) sets a terrazzo map of the state underfoot. Written on the Land traces 13,000 years from Folsom spear points to Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellers. Open 10:00–17:00 daily.
Egyptian Mummies shows two 2,000-year-old mummies alongside their CT-scan reconstructions, while North American Indian Cultures holds over 1,000 objects gathered on 1920s field expeditions. Open 9:00–17:00.
Denver's oldest standing structure: an 1859 log house that worked as a stagecoach stop on the Cherokee Trail, four miles out from the young gold camp. Costumed staff run the 12-acre farm with draft horses and 1860s outbuildings.
An 1883 Italianate townhouse built for Rocky Mountain News founder William Byers, then home to the Evans family for 90 years. Rooms are restored to 1912-1924, with original gas fixtures and the family's own furniture in place.
The 1894 granite capitol carries 200 ounces of Colorado gold leaf on its dome and rose onyx wainscoting inside — a stone whose entire known world supply was exhausted in this building. Free 45-minute tours, 10:00–15:00 weekdays.
Denver's 1919 City Beautiful centrepiece pairs a Greek amphitheater with the Voorhies Memorial seal pool and two Alexander Phimister Proctor bronzes, Bronco Buster and On the War Trail, cast in the mid-1920s.
Margaret Brown got off Titanic in Lifeboat 6 and came home to this 1889 lava-stone Queen Anne on Pennsylvania Street. Slated for demolition in 1970, it was saved and restored using photographs Brown herself commissioned in 1910.
These lawns sit on Denver's 1858 City Cemetery. An 1893 contract to relocate 5,000 bodies collapsed in scandal when the undertaker chopped remains into child-size boxes to bill more; roughly 2,000 burials were never moved.
The 1890 home of Dr. Justina Ford, Colorado's first licensed Black woman physician, who delivered over 7,000 babies here because hospitals refused her admitting privileges. The house was moved 12 blocks in 1984 to escape demolition.
Welton Street was called the Harlem of the West. The wedge-shaped Rossonian (1912) booked Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis after downtown rooms turned them away; sidewalk plaques mark the surviving club addresses.
Denver's oldest restored residential block: 13 houses from the 1870s and 1880s, all that remains of Auraria, the rival townsite that merged into Denver in 1860. Its families were displaced when the campus was built after the 1965 flood.
Colorado liquor licence No. 1 hangs framed behind the bar of this 1893 saloon, opened by Henry 'Shorty Scout' Zietz, who rode with Buffalo Bill. Some 575 taxidermy mounts and 125 firearms cover the walls of the ground-floor room.