Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Revolutionizing · Modernizing · Simplifying
Sixty-five feet of concrete standing over a town of about 130 people. That is Genoa, Colorado, and honestly most folks have blown right past it at 80 miles an hour on I-70 without a clue what they were missing.
Here is the part people miss. That funny-looking tower off Old Highway 24, about 85 miles northeast of Colorado Springs, once claimed you could see six states from the top. Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, New Mexico and South Dakota. And for over a decade it has been locked up and silent. Not anymore.
Back up to 1926. The automobile boom is on, and everybody is driving Highway 24 because the interstate does not exist yet. Enter Charles W. Gregory, a promoter so shameless people started calling him Colorado's P.T. Barnum. Him and his partner Myrtle Le Bow start pouring concrete on a spot along the highway.
It began as a gas station and café. Basic stuff. But Gregory understood something that still works today. If you give road-trippers a reason to pull over, they will pull over. So he built up. And up. Sixty-five feet of it.
The pitch was the six-state view, and it worked. In 1933 the place landed in Ripley's Believe It or Not, which back then was national fame you could not buy. Then in 1934 it got confirmed as the highest point between New York and Denver. Think about that. You are standing on top of the whole eastern half of the country, out here on the plains where most people assume there is nothing to see.
The view got people in the door. The junk inside is what made the legend.
Because the tower was never just a tower. It doubled as a museum and a vintage shop, and it was stuffed to the rafters with oddities. A two-headed calf. An eight-legged pig. More than 50,000 glass bottles. Native American arrowheads and a pile of Old West artifacts. It was the kind of place where you walked in for the view and walked out an hour later still finding stuff you had not noticed.
The last owner-curator was a man named Jerry Chubbuck, and he was the tower for years. When Chubbuck died in August of 2013, the whole thing closed. Then on September 20, 2014, all of it, the calf, the pig, the bottles, every last oddity, got auctioned off. The tower went dark. And for anybody who grew up out here, that hurt.
Troy McCue, who runs Lincoln County Economic Development now, still remembers climbing to the top as a kid. He called it the "end-all, be-all." That tells you everything about what this place meant. In a town that peaked at 257 residents back in 1950 and sits around 130 today, the tower was not just the tallest thing. It was the thing.
So here is what actually happened while it sat shuttered.
In 2016 a group of fans did something you do not see every day. They bought the property outright and then gave it away. They donated it to a nonprofit called Friends of the Genoa Tower, Inc. And that nonprofit spent roughly the next decade doing the unglamorous work. Raising money. Writing grants. Keeping a 90-year-old concrete tower from falling apart while they figured out how to bring it back.
The number came to about $3 million in restoration work, and a lot of that came from Colorado's historic preservation funds. That matters. This is not some private developer flipping a roadside novelty. This is the state deciding that a weird concrete tower on the Eastern Plains is worth saving. And if you ask me, they are right.
The tower held its official reopening weekend on May 1 and 2, 2026. And the date was chosen on purpose.
2026 is the tower's 100th birthday. It is also Colorado's 150th year of statehood. So you have got a genuine roadside relic hitting a century in the same year the state hits 150, and somebody smart lined those up. That is the kind of story that gives you an actual reason to pull off the interstate instead of just telling yourself you will stop next time.
Couple of practical things. Opening weekend ran on timed-entry reserved tickets, so this is not a wander-up-whenever situation, at least for now. And Lincoln County residents get in free, which is a nice touch for the people who watched this thing sit empty for eleven years.
Look, the plains do not sell themselves. Everybody treats that stretch of I-70 like something to survive between Denver and Kansas. But that is exactly why a place like this matters. It is a reason to slow down.
The address is 30121 Old Highway 24, Genoa, CO 80818. Grab the reserved ticket, take the exit, and climb the same stairs Troy McCue climbed as a kid. A hundred years of Colorado, one very strange tower, and six states on a clear day if the promoters were telling the truth. Buckle up.