THEN & NOW

THEN & NOW

The Wild West Grows Up

by AwA

The floors of the museum talk. Tread as lightly as you can, but you’ll still cause the floors inside the Steamboat Art Museum to creak, as they were meant to do in order to announce a stranger’s arrival.

When the nonprofit Steamboat Art Museum (SAM) did renovations on the building, there was a thought of replacing the floors. They do, after all, creak. But a little research revealed that the floors were installed when the building was a bank, and the boards creak in order to alert tellers if someone was in the building. The floors are just one aspect of note. Next door to the museum, in the gift shop, the First National Bank’s original safe can be viewed along with art supplies and art from more than 25 local artists, authors and crafters. The entry doors and upstairs windows are original. These details are the reasons the building is included on the
National Registry of Historic Places.