Tejon Street looks ordinary now.

People walk past buildings with their phones in hand. Cars pass through the intersection. Someone stops for coffee, while someone else is already late for work.

But 150 years ago, this wasn’t just another stretch of downtown Colorado Springs. 

It was the beginning.

Across the city, places that seem ordinary today have played host to state celebrations, community traditions, concerts and moments of tragedy.

The buildings and people may have changed, but the stories remain the same. And sometimes, all it takes is someone pointing it out to realize how much history you’ve been walking past.

That’s the idea behind the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum’s “America 250/Colorado 150: Seeing History in Place,” a walking tour through the heart of Colorado Springs that asks locals to look at familiar places through a historical lens.

“I’ve lived here my whole life, and the first time I led one of these tours downtown I was amazed by all the things I had overlooked,” program administrator Meg Yevara said. “We’re so often in cars that we don’t really stop to look at these buildings and consider the stories behind these different landscapes. So it’s just an opportunity for folks to get out, slow down and hear some interesting stories.”

The museum will offer two opportunities this month for residents to do exactly that, with the chance to sign up online at www.cspm.org/events.

The first tour is scheduled from 9:30 to 11 a.m. Saturday for $10 per person, while the second opportunity takes place from 2 to 3:30 p.m.Sept. 26 for $15.

Both tours begin and end at The Mining Exchange Hotel and cover about 1 mile over 90 minutes, with the Sept. 26 tour offering an additional 30 minutes for a complimentary themed cocktail at the hotel’s bar. 

The strolls are part of the museum’s commemoration of two major anniversaries in 2026: 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and 150 years of Colorado statehood.

But rather than simply recounting dates and names, the tour uses the city itself as a history book.

“How do you mark time?” Yevara asked. “How are anniversaries a way of marking the significance of important events? We’re looking at the history of the Pikes Peak region and telling all sorts of fascinating stories, but we’re also thinking about the bigger picture. How do we fit into the national narrative?”

Take The Antlers, A Wyndham Hotel.

Today, it stands as one of downtown’s most recognizable areas. But in 1901, the hotel became the center of Colorado’s 25th anniversary celebration, hosting speeches, parades and a women’s congress as the state marked a quarter-century of statehood.

And that’s just one of the stories tucked into the downtown landscape.

The tour also points out the location where the first stake was placed in the founding of Colorado Springs, near what is now Pikes Peak Avenue. It marks the spot where the settlement was first established as Fountain Colony before eventually becoming Colorado Springs.

For Yevara, connecting those stories is part of what makes a walking tour different from reading about local history in a book.

“Your history matters,” she said. “Our history matters. We’re part of the story. So what does it mean to you? How do we play into the greater narrative of what this time period was like for our country?”

Yevara said much of the research comes from sitting down with historians Leah Davis Witherow and Matt Mayberry, while also using the museum’s Story of Us, a mapping tool that connects locations throughout the Pikes Peak region with historical stories and photographs.

“It’s one of the best ways to learn about our city,” Yevara said. “If you’re a recent addition to the area, we get a ton of new folks. It’s also helpful to sort of take a different look and get a different perspective of a city you know well or may have never seen before.”

For those who miss the September strolls, the museum also offers private History Strolls for groups that can be scheduled online. 

Because sometimes learning about where you live doesn’t require going anywhere new. 

Sometimes, all it takes is looking at where you’ve been standing all along.