During your visit to this Kansas attraction, experience interactive learning through living history, educational programs and historic re-enactments. As you explore the historic structures furnished with period artifacts, buffalo hunters, blacksmiths, farmers and other costumed staff will bring the American frontier to life.

The Old Cowtown Experience

Buffalo Hunter and Trader

Learn about the area’s first economic activities, hunting and trading, in the Buffalo Hunter and Trader area of Old Cowtown.  At the Trader’s Cabin you can see and touch animal skins as you listen to buffalo hunters tell tales of the plains. Also located in the Buffalo Hunter and Trader area is Munger House & Garden, a National Historic Landmark that once served as a boarding house, church, post office and public gathering place.

Business and Industrial Areas

Cowtown’s Business and Industrial area represents a business district of an 1870’s town with commercial buildings that depict the types of businesses common to most towns in the Old West. Visit the Train Depot that once linked the Wichita and Southwestern Railroad Company with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad to the north.  Discover medicines made from herbs, roots, bark, berries, oils and dry powders in the 19th century Drugstore. At the Blacksmith see how the industrial revolution changed the role of the blacksmith. Learn about the buffalo, elk, deer and antelope that provided residents of the 1800s with a steady supply of domestic meats and wild game at the Meat Market.  In Fritz Snitzler’s Saloon, you will see how the establishment’s monthly license fees for gambling paid for many city services preventing the need for taxes.

Residential Street

The housing boom of the early 1870s created a varied residential area. Visit the Murdock House & Garden, representative of the era’s comfortable, middle class homes.  The Story & A Half House would have been considered a “starter” home for low-to-typical class families during the later part of the 19th century.  At Hodge House, learn about one of Wichita’s first African American families to own their home. Next to the Hodge House you can visit Cowtown’s first Presbyterian Church.

Drovers Camp

In the early 1870s, cowboys started to move cattle from the area up north for better money. Stop by Drovers Camp to hear tales of the lonely trails they travelled and learn about aspects of the cowboy life such as cooking meals, roping, branding and feeding cattle.

DeVore Farm

Discover an authentic 1800’s farm. The five-acre DeVore Farm is fully stocked with animals and machinery common to the period and explores what daily life would have been like on a 19th century farm. Visitors are likely to see costumed interpreters feeding the chickens, milking cows, preparing meals and working in the kitchen as well as tending to the garden and harvesting corn and wheat.

Shopping in S.G. Bastian and Sons Mercantile

Be sure to stop by S.G. Bastian and Sons Mercantile, located in the Old Cowtown Museum’s Visitor’s Center. Handcrafted bonnets, hand muffs, jewelry, handmade metal work, spurs, hats, toys such as cap guns, bow and arrow sets, stuffed animals, and locally-made jams, jellies, salsas and peanut brittle are available to purchase. 

-          Stop by Old Cowtown Museum’s Empire Hall featuring special exhibits throughout the year that highlight specific historical topics and allow the museum to showcase additional pieces from its artifact collection.