Old Cowtown Museum

The Old Cowtown Museum in Kansas City, Kansas is the perfect place if you want to take a trip back in time to the frontier days of cowboys, ranchers, and wagon-bound settlers. If any of you remember playing the game “Oregon Trail” as a kid, then the Old Cowtown Museum will definitely make you feel nostalgic! The 17-acre park is full of frontier-style buildings (around half of which are original 19th-century constructions), actors taking on rolls like settlers, cooks, and blacksmiths, and a petting zoo/farm with barnyard animals. It’s a great place to take the kids who’ll not only enjoy playing cowboy and interacting with the re-enactors, but who’ll learn something in the process!

This living history museum illustrates how life was like in the 1870s through a sample of the sights, sounds and activities common to a Midwestern town dedicated to livestock. There they experience the dramatic clash of the ideals of Victoria and the economic realities of these competing forces to create an economically viable city and Victorian metropolis.

Christmas is wonderful here, but anytime of year is worth a visit, for adults and the kiddos alike.