Rowley's one-night museum opens for its fortieth summer
Population eight, pizza night once a month, and a main street kept exactly as it was left.
ROWLEY — The first pizza night of the summer goes Saturday, which means the town of eight people will briefly be a town of four hundred, and the museum that is actually a whole main street will be open until the last car leaves.
Rowley stopped being a working town decades ago and decided, more or less on purpose, to become a kept one. The saloon, the church, the school and the trading post stand furnished as they were left, maintained by a community association that measures its budget in pizza sales.
Forty years in, the model has outlasted fancier plans elsewhere. The three grain elevators — among the last wooden rows standing in the province — got new cladding on the north faces this spring, paid for by last season's twelve pizza nights and a donation jar that is, famously, an old cream can.
Doors open at five. The association asks visitors to park along the tracks and to remember the town has no cell coverage, which the regulars consider a feature.
