Barton County Historical Society Museum and Village

The Barton County Historical Society began its village in 1964 on land from the Charles Hulme estate, on US-281 just south of the Arkansas River from Great Bend, and has spent the decades since bringing the county's buildings to it. The first, in 1967, was St. Paul Lutheran Church from near Albert, built in October 1898 of limestone quarried in Rush County and hauled two and a half miles to the site, put back on its foundations by men and horses after a 1909 cyclone. The District 50 schoolhouse came in 1968, and so did the 1910 Santa Fe depot from Belpre, with its dock, its brick walk and the operator's room as the last agent knew it.

The Castleton post office of about 1871 arrived in 1971 from a town that had faded so far by the late 1940s that a film crew used it as an 1895 Illinois town. In 1976 and 1977 a Boy Scout lodge moved the E. J. Dodge family's 1873 rock house stone by stone from Walnut Creek. A blacksmith shop, barns for implements and tractors, and a working Waupun windmill on a well that still gives good water fill out the grounds.

The newest house is the oddest: a Lustron, one of the prefabricated homes of the postwar years, built in 1950, taken apart and put back together here in 2005 and 2006, and furnished as it would have been in its decade. The museum building holds the county's collections and a Santa Fe Trail interpretive exhibit.