100-year-old Colorado tower that claims view of six states just reopened after 13 years
Jul 2, 2026, 9:51 AM | Updated: Jul 8, 2026, 10:37 am
About 100 miles east of Denver, just off I-70, the Great Plains flatten out into the kind of emptiness that makes your eyes go wide. That’s exactly what Charles Gregory was counting on.
In the 1920s, Gregory — a showman whom locals called Colorado’s P.T. Barnum — built a 65-foot concrete observation tower on a hill outside the tiny town of Genoa and made a bold claim: you could see six states from the top. Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota and New Mexico, all visible from one spot. Ripley’s Believe It or Not published the claim in 1933. Whether it’s actually true has been cheerfully debated ever since.
Gregory’s original hustle was pure roadside Americana. He’d stand on the tower with a megaphone, read license plates off passing cars and holler at drivers to come get gas. Pilots flying into Stapleton International Airport used the tower as a landmark to begin their descent into Denver. After World War II, a man named Jerry Chubbuck bought the property and turned it into a museum of oddities — rooms overflowing with artifacts, curios and junk, capped by a trick cigar box that launched a rubber lizard at anyone who opened it. When Chubbuck died in 2013, the tower closed and his collections were auctioned off.
Now, after a $3 million renovation, the World’s Wonder View Tower is open to the public again. The restored tower sits at 30121 Old Highway 24 in Genoa — about a two-hour drive east of Denver on I-70, roughly the same distance as Breckenridge in the other direction. Colorado Preservation Inc. has listed it among the state’s endangered places, and it was featured in CBS Colorado’s Colorado 150 anniversary series this spring.
The six-state claim? Still unverified. The elevation at Genoa is 5,600 feet and the tower adds another 65. There are at least 54 peaks in the eastern United States taller than that, which makes Ripley’s other famous claim about the tower — that it’s “the highest point between New York and Denver” — almost certainly false. But then, accuracy was never really the point. The point was always the view, the story and the excuse to stop.
