Garden Park

The bronze sends readers to the museums listed below, and no list hangs there now; the Society's 1970 record printed one. It credits two professors in the East; the digging was done by Cañon City people: the schoolteacher Oramel Lucas opened quarries for Edward Cope in 1877, and the rancher and Civil War veteran Marshall Felch worked Othniel Marsh's quarry into the 1880s, sending east skeletons that stand in the Smithsonian. Later a high school teacher, Frederick Kessler, and his students found the Stegosaurus that became Colorado's state fossil in 1982.

What the plaque says

This tablet is the property of the State of Colorado Garden Park Type Locality of Dinosaurs The first remains of several species of dinosaurs were found within a two-mile radius of this point in 1877 by Prof. O.C. Marsh of Yale University, and Prof. E.D. Cope of the Academy of Sciences of Philadelphia. This discovery of extinct giant reptiles in the Western Hemisphere received world-wide acclaim. The specimens excavated on these and subsequent expeditions are in the museums listed below. Erected by the State Historical Society of Colorado from the Mrs. J. N. Hall Foundation and by the Canon City Geology Club and citizens of Canon City 1953

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Royal Gorge Bridge — 7.6 mi
  Built in six months in 1929 by a Texas promoter for people to pay to walk across, and still standing after a 2013 fire took 48 of the park's 52 buildings.
• Pikes Peak Cog Railway — 27 mi
  A mattress maker's answer to a two-day mule ride, running since 1891, shut in 2017 and rebuilt from the rails up with Swiss trains in 2021.
• Manitou Cliff Dwellings — 28 mi
  A pueblo from McElmo Canyon, dismantled, shipped across the Rockies by rail and set in cement into a dynamited overhang as cliff dwellings it never was.
• Garden of the Gods — 30 mi
  Named in 1859 by a surveyor who wanted no beer garden there, and given to the city in 1909 on the condition it stay free, dry and unbuilt.

More markers nearby

• Rudd Cabin — 6.6 mi
• Oldest Oil Field in West — 11 mi
• Ute Pass — 28 mi
• Colorado City — 29 mi