The Tong House

In the South Park City Museum there stands a homesteader's cabin which was once called the "Tong House." The building began its journey as a small cabin situated in the "ghost town of Leavick," and was then moved to the South Park City Museum to be renovated into a Chinese Tong House, similar to the one that supposedly sat on the very same spot.[1] After the Tong House in the museum was broken into and almost all of the artifacts stolen or damaged, the house became a storage shed until 1981 when the museum turned it into a homesteader's cabin.[2] Back in the late 1800s, the original Tong House was used as a community space. Chinese miners would gather there every morning to receive their work assignments. According to the plaque that was affixed to the Tong House replica, the Tong House was "the only building in Fairplay that [the Chinese] were allowed to use."[3] Whether this restriction was actually enforced is unclear, as there are indicators that other Chinese individuals lived in Fairplay.