A glimpse of the past and future

Durango Discovery Museum Offers Look Inside Old Power Plant

By Ken Wright, 5-17-06

Tomorrow night Durangoans will finally get the chance to peak inside the transformation that the old down-town power plant along the Animas River is undergoing into the Durango Discovery Museum. An open house will be held Thursday (May 18), from 4:30 to 7:30 pm. There will be refreshments, tours, entertainment, and a chance to meet and give input to the project-planning team members.

Right now, the Children’s Museum, a hands-on science exploration center for kids, is crammed into a small space above the Durango Arts Center. The new museum will be set inside Durango’s old power plant, along the Animas River, a living historic artifact that itself tells a little-known role of the San Juans and Durango in shaping the modern world.

The 116-year-old power house is the oldest known steam-powered AC power plant left in the world. The story of the Durango power plant begins in the late 1800s, when Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla were trying to convince municipalities to adopt their competing forms of transmitting electricity. Edison was promoting his DC (direct current) form of transmission, while Tesla was urging companies to adopt his AC (alternating current) method.

AC ultimately won the electric wars – it’s the method used to transmit electricity today – but only after the method was tested and proven in the San Juan Mountains.

In the 1880s, L.L. Nunn, a seafood-restaurant owner in Durango, invested in the Gold King Mine, above Telluride. The mine soon exhausted the wood around the mine for generating power, and had to then laboriously haul coal in by horseback. It was a lot of time and money for little return, so Nunn borrowed $100,000 from the mine and persuaded George Westinghouse to come out here and build an AC power plant in Ames, near Ophir, in 1891.

It was the first commercial use of AC power in the world. Nunn was so taken with AC power’s success that he later built a school in Telluride to teach students how to use and develop AC power.

Following the success of the Ames plant, in 1893 Durango built the first municipal steam-powered AC power plant in the world. The plant powered the city’s businesses, residences, and streetcar system. (Doctors at the local hospital would call the plant before surgery to make sure power would be available throughout the operation.) Taking a cue from Durango’s success, in 1895 Telluride also began receiving AC energy from the Ames plant. In 1895, the first Eastern AC power plant, at Niagra, NY, was built – AC power had become the standard for the future of electricity transmission.

The Durango power plant ran until 1974, and has remained vacant ever since. Although the Ames plant is still standing, it has been rebuilt twice.

When the Children’s Museum moves into the power house, the “Children’s” will being dropped from the title because the Durango Discovery Museum will target all ages, kids through adults, as well as visitors to the area.

“It’s the coolest project in Durango right now,” says Paul Wilbert, a former Children’s Museum board member and long-time advocate of the museum. Wilbert was involved in the museum’s first looks at the possibility of moving into the power plant in 1994. “To me a science center is one of the things that makes a great town, along with theaters, libraries, performing-arts centers, and good schools.”

Slated to open next year, the museum’s 1.7 acres will also feature an outdoor river-front plaza and café. The present unused smokestack will become the Durango Mountain Resort sundial, spilling it’s time-telling shadow across the plaza. The plaza will also feature a carousel of carved native animals. The museum itself, housed inside the old power plant rebuilt to the original design, with be constructed with state of the art energy efficiency and green design.

As Durangoans now see it, the power plant is a small, innocuous building next to the fire station along Camino del Rio. The tall smokeless smokestack marks the site from a distance. Visitors tomorrow will see that the main space inside the building is cavernous. In all, there is 9,000 square feet of usable space for the museum. On the south end of the main room, two generators, enormous steel semicircular enclosures, still stand on each side of the room. One turbine is gem: a 1906 500-kilowatt GE generator. (There once was a sister generator, but it was killed by lightning.) In the 1970s, GE sent a team of engineers to inspect and acquire the generator for a museum back East, but Westinghouse turned them down since it was still in use. The other is a 750-kilowatt model from the 1930s.

Both of these artifacts will be on display in the museum.

“The stories buildings tell are about the place and the people,” Discovery Museum Project Director Jeff Vierling says. “This one’s got a hell of a story, a terrific story to tell about this area.”

One warning, though: There is presently no parking at the power house, so visitors tomorrow will have to bike, walk, skateboard, roller blade, or float the river there.

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