Limon Heritage Day

At four in the afternoon on June 13, 2026, the Limon FFA began serving brownies and ice cream inside a railroad dining car. Outside, in the Railroad Park, the food vendors opened at the same hour: Mac Envy, Big Nips BBQ, Tiger Mike’s, Shiver Shack, Jordan’s Food Truck and the Knights of Columbus. The Rotary club ran a beer tent, craft vendors set out their tables, and children lined up for face painting. The museum had asked people to bring chairs and blankets. At six the bluegrass band Stray Grass played in the park. At nine, 500 drones rose and lit the sky above the old rail cars. Spectators could follow a synchronized music track on their phones.

Brownies in the Dining Car

Heritage Day is the yearly celebration of the Limon Heritage Museum & Railroad Park. In 2026 the day began early in the afternoon. From one to three the museum paid admission for everyone at the Limon Community Swimming Pool, and from one to six the museum complex was open for tours. The drone show was a Signature Initiative of the America 250 – Colorado 150 Commission, flown by Brightflight Drone Shows with support from UCHealth, Chevron, Tallgrass and the Colorado Lottery. Two days later the museum’s thank-you list also named the Town of Limon, the Limon Ambulance Service, the Colorado State Patrol, a septic company, and “Our Museum Guides & Team of Volunteers.” A calendar listing on another site gave the day’s hours as 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The museum’s own schedule ran until the drone show at nine.

The museum’s website reports Heritage Day 2026 as “a HUGE success” and looks forward to 2027. It has not posted a date for that edition.

The depot and the five acres

The festival is laid out across the museum’s five-acre complex, which sits directly behind Limon Town Hall. From I-70, take exit 359 or 361, drive a mile into downtown, and go two and a half blocks south of the stoplight. The town’s page tells visitors to “look for the cool historic railroad cars.”

The 1910 Limon Depot stands at 899 1st Street. It once served as a “Union” depot for both the Rock Island and the Union Pacific railroads. Heritage Society volunteers restored it and still maintain it, and it is on the National Register of Historic Places. Inside are Colorado artist Bob Coonts’ “American West” poster display, the town’s Houtz Native American Collection, the permanent “Trains on the Plains” exhibit, a railroad office restored to about 1970, a working N scale model of Limon’s 1940s rail yard, and a photo essay, “Individuals Who Shaped the Eastern Plains.”

The Exhibit Building at 701 1st Street holds an old-time store, a gas station and a prairie kitchen. It also has Limon’s weather station, a wheat exhibit, a full-size Cheyenne tipi, an antique sheepherder’s wagon, the Prairie Voices Gallery and an exhibit on the area’s military history. The town’s page calls Limon the “Hub City of the Eastern Plains.”

Antique windmills and farm machinery stand among kept gardens in the Railroad Park. The park also holds the Prairie Monument, the Western Saddle Boxcar, an 1894 one-room schoolhouse, the dining car and a Union Pacific caboose. Nearby are the Gates House and a bronze by Herb Mignery, “Prairie Odyssey,” described by the museum as a frontiersman “with rough hands and a weathered face.” Admission is free, and the season runs from Memorial Day through Labor Day.

The museum has existed since 1991. On August 1, 2026, it marked its 35th anniversary with cake in the Exhibit Building. That was also Colorado’s 150th birthday, and a Colorado Central Plains quilt made for the occasion hung on display. A small trailer decked out in patriotic colors sat among the farm machinery with 32 posters tracing the museum’s history. Three tour guides finished their hours that summer and earned the Limon Heritage Society’s 2026 Summer Scholarship: Raylyn Perry, Kendall Davis and Kash Snyder.

Pie, cowboy poetry and buffalo burgers

Heritage Day has not always fallen in June, and it has not always ended after dark. In 2022 it was held on July 23 and ran from nine in the morning to two in the afternoon. It opened with a prayer of dedication and a ceremony dedicating bricks. At 9:30 a homemade pie sale began in the dining car. There was a quilt show in Town Hall, cowboy poetry at ten and again at one, music by DJ Danny Adams, and free face painting. Buffalo burgers went on sale at 11:30 for $8 for adults and $6 for children six to twelve, and Shiver Shack sold shaved ice. The museum cut the ribbon on its Gallery of Guns exhibit. Vintage cars, a tractor and a combine stood on the grounds, and tours featured a newly unveiled 1917 Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

By 2026 the bricks had a day of their own. On July 4 the Heritage Society dedicated them to people and businesses who had given their time to Limon, Lincoln County and the museum. Cookies from Scoops and Giggles Ice Cream Shop and Bakery followed.

A centennial and a beard contest

On August 1, 2009, the 18th Annual Heritage Day doubled as Limon’s 100th birthday. Vivian Lowe’s account in The Fence Post that July described the plan. It began at 9:30 a.m. at Pershing Cemetery, with a bus leaving the Depot Welcome Center at 9:15, for the fifth annual cemetery tour. There, descendants in costume told the stories of early settlers. That year the featured pioneer families were the Mariners, the Knapps and the Morrisons.

At 10:30 the Railroad Park opened with vendors, music and kids’ rides. More than 30 demonstrators, many in vintage clothing, worked at quilting, spinning, chair caning, tatting, knitting, loom and carriage wheel weaving, genealogy and lace making. A blacksmith and a barrel maker worked alongside them. Jim Fulmer and friends from Simla brought more than 12 antique tractors and a set of hit-and-miss engines to the Museum Machinery Walkway. The Welcome Tent handed out maps, water, Centennial buttons and parasols. At 11:30 Victor Walters directed summer camp youth musicians in “Our Town, A Musical Journey” under the trees at the Depot lawn Music Tent.

The Limon Red Hat Society sold homemade pie on the dining car at $2.50 a slice “while it lasts.” A contingent of Sons of Norway from several towns showed Norwegian crafts and shared food and songs. Children had barrel train rides, an FFA petting corral, face painting by Crackers the Clown, a school marm, an old-time tug of war, and Sadie, a baby buffalo from Prairie Ridge Buffalo Ranch. Before the noon barbecue, a State of Colorado Centennial Proclamation was read at the Pioneer Schoolhouse. The Depot had just been restored and newly housed the Houtz collection and the N scale model of Limon in the 1940s. A Centennial Quilt Show was on view at the Hub City Senior Center.

At three, a music and memorial ceremony at the Memorial Gardens Pergola honored the late Thomas J. Hilferty and the 2009 Limon High senior class. Earlier, at 1:15, men had signed up and posed for photographs at the Western Boxcar for the Centennial Beard Growing Contest. Prizes would wait until November 3, the date of Limon’s incorporation in 1909.