Robert & Nancy Woodward

Interviewer Bob Hult

August 4, 2002

Side A

This is Bob Hult and today is August 4, 2002 and I’m here at the home of Nancy and Robert Woodward at their home, roughly about a mile south of 285 and about four or five miles east of Bailey, Colorado, and we’re going to be talking about their experiences here in the ranch area from their earliest recollections.

So Nancy, you started out here. Actually, you were born in Denver.

Nancy:  I was born in Denver, but I don’t remember a time that I wasn’t up here in the summer.  I think my parents brought me up as a babe in arms later the fall that I was born.  I was born the end of September and I think I came up here before the end of that year and I spent nearly every summer up here up until the time I was about nine, when the World War II started and the gas was getting hard to get to come up here. But in my younger days, my parents and grand-parents would hire a housekeeper, cook and come up around the end of June or first of July and spend until Labor Day - was always when you closed up and went home.  But we spent the entire summer here; our diet was a lot of trout from the stream.

Which runs right through the property?

Nancy:  The stream runs 2 ½ miles trough the property.

Okay, is that part of the South Platte?

Nancy:  Deer Creek. It’s part of the north fork of the South Platte.

Right, yes.

Nancy:   My grandfather was a wonderful fisherman and so he went out and got fish regularly. We also ate a lot of beef because one of the other families that would come up and live for the summer were the Pater family from Roggen, Colorado, they had the Pater (inaudible) Company and they would always bring lots of wonderful cuts of beef and also chickens that they would kill on the spot and we would have lots of chicken dinners, so we ate well.

Did you have an ice house up here to keep?

Nancy:  Yes, we had ice boxes and there used an ice house up on Deer Creek where they would cut the ice from the stream in the wintertime and we would go up there and get blocks of ice, as well as a cold spring, which I haven’t quite located, but it was maybe a mile west, north of 285.  We would go by the ranch house across the road up there and we all had five-gallon demijohns that we would fill with the water from the cold spring and we all had great big funnels and buckets and they’d scoop it up from this spring that would bubble to the top.

Oh my.

Nancy:  And then these demijohns were fitted with a canvas cover and a rope and canvas rigging and would hang someplace from the ceiling in each of our cabins and that was the drinking water that we all had.  One of the other families that was up here were the Hover family and they had the Hover Drug Company in Denver and these were great big glass bottles that perfume had come in originally.  Each family had one or two; I know we had two and it hung out on the back porch and you’d go and you’d tip it; it was on this sling and you could tip it and fill the pitcher with…

Robert:  Wonderful cold water.

Nancy:  This wonderful pure water.

I guess. That water was better than what you’d find - - you had a well, you said, you had a hand-dug well at one time?

Nancy:  Our hand-dug wells we didn’t drink the water; it wasn’t potable.

Oh okay.

Nancy:  They were too shallow wells and we used it for everything else, but would never, we’ve never drunk the water.

So this spring was north of 285 then.

Nancy:  It was and it’s up in the Deer Creek Ranch (inaudible) someplace! It’s on the south side of the stream.

Robert:  It’s about where the current Road 43 starts across the valley, which is a little above the elementary school.

Right, exactly.

Nancy:  In some places you go along 43, you can look down and there’s a grove of aspen that’s quite lush and I could never walk down there because it’s private property of course, but I - - it’s about the right location for this spring.

Well, that’s got to be four miles from here.

Robert:  You’ll need to indicate that that property was part of the Association in those days and even though it’s not now.

Nancy:  Oh, that’s right.

Right.  They owned this whole valley at one time?

Nancy:  Right, we owned 3,000…

Robert:  3,300 acres.

Nancy:  Above the highway.

You mentioned that it was your grandfather had this property originally?

Nancy:  My great-grandfather.

Great-grandfather.

Robert:  Milo Smith.

Nancy:  Milo Smith was my great-grandfather came up here interested in the cooper mine; copper came across the hill from us in Roland Valley.

What time frame period would you guess?

Nancy:  In about 1883.

Robert:  Yes.

Nancy:  We’ll let Woody talk about that because he knows the history by heart.

Okay, good!

Nancy:  But he wasn’t around when we used to go get water and of course, we had to go get water every few days.

Yeah, I’m sure.

Nancy:  Because the five gallons didn’t last the whole family.

That’s a pretty good hike though.

Nancy:  Oh, we drove.

Ah, okay. I would say, carrying five-gallon jugs at about five pounds a gallon that’s a lot to haul four or five miles.

Nancy:  Ah, no (laughter).  That was in the car.

Robert:  That was in the thirties.

So  it was in the mid to latter part of the thirties then, you remember.

Nancy:  That’s right; probably the latter part of the thirties.

Okay.

Nancy:  The other thing that we used to eat was a lot of lettuce and peas and those were raised by a gentleman named Ebb Howard, who had a farm in Burland, which wasn’t Burland then at all. Ebb and his wife had a winter home in Arizona perhaps, but they came up here early in the spring and tilled the soil and grew the best lettuce and peas and we’d go over there every few days to get our vegetables, and they had other root vegetables, too.  So we’d get our vegetables over there and when I was little, we used to get our milk up at the ranch house, which is now on the north side of the highway.

Robert:  That’s the ranch house when you were growing up.

Nancy:  Yeah, it was the ranch house on the property when I was growing up.

When I was talking to the Eos brothers, they mentioned that their father used to raise lettuce and started making lettuce crates to be able to ship them and it surprised me that you could grow lettuce at this altitude.

Nancy:  I know, I know.

Has the climate changed that much, do you think?

Nancy:   I don’t know, but Mr. Howard had  - - you know ,we’d get heads of leaf lettuce that were just enormous and we got those through the time that we lived up here when our children were little.

Robert:  ‘Til the late sixties.

Nancy:  ‘Til the late sixties, yeah.

I’ll be darned.

Nancy:  Yeah.  And the ladies would occupy themselves in the afternoon each with a big pan full of peas and they’d sit with a little pan and shell the peas into it and that would be our entertainment and preparation for dinner.  Now let me thing – what else can I tell you about, my early days up here. Oh! Doing the wash was one of the interesting things.  We had saw horses and we had great, huge three-foot in diameter washtubs and they would take these outside the kitchen and fill one with hot soapy water and the other ones with cold rinse water; they had a ringer and they would do the washing by hand.  Now this was the hired lady who did a lot of that.  I used to stand around and watch her.

Did you have several families that did this together?

Nancy:  No, that was just - - I think each family did it.

Each family, okay.

Nancy:  Because while we’re in a different house now, one of the other families - we found a wringer and washtubs under the house.  That’s how everybody washed in those days and then we all had lines outdoors.

What did you do for fun.  Now, you’re a young child and  before World War II,  and you come up here; I mean, being up here had to be a treat by itself.

Nancy:  Right.

But was there anything that you used to do that was considered recreational?

Nancy:  I hiked all over this entire property. I walked everywhere – by myself! There weren’t any other children my age. And one time, I got lost and I got confused about which way the stream ran and I ended up clear down what is now the end of Burland, where Deer Creek goes in down there.  I can still remember being scared.

I can imagine.

Nancy:  I can remember falling off of rocks that I was climbing but my parents – well, my father was in Denver – he would drive to Denver to work – did he stay in Denver when the rest of the family - -

Robert:  Must have.

Nancy:  I think he must have, I don’t remember my father being around except for the weekends.

Robert:  It was a long drive in those days, so I’m sure he did not commute.  He’d go by way of Evergreen to get here.

Nancy:  When my grandparents and great-grandparents used to come up, initially they came up in a horse and buggy and it would take them two days.

From Denver.

Nancy:  From Denver they would - - maybe they would spend a night in Morrison, they’d spend a night at ?Wancrest?  I think.

Robert:  No, they’d spent the night at Silver Springs Lodge, which his roughly where Tiny Town is now.

Nancy:  Oh that’s right, right.

Oh okay.

Robert:  That was the first night out of Denver.

Nancy:  Okay.

So that 285 corridor was there in that time frame.

Robert:  Yeah… they would come up - - they ran up - - I think they went up Turkey creek canyon to that far.  There was also a road, the Bradford Road, they may have used sometimes which came in about what’s now Conifer, but I think they came up Turkey Creek Canyon.

Nancy:  But the thing they always talked about was that my grandfather stayed in Denver and worked during the week and then - - he worked out of the stockyards.  He was a cattle broker.  And on Friday afternoon, he would jump on the train with his bicycle and ride the train up here and then bicycle down, up and down Crow Hill to get to (laughter) to spend the weekend and then on Sunday night, he would reverse the process and ride back down to Denver.  So they made them tough in those days.

Yeah!  Uh-huh.

Nancy:  It was riding an old-fashioned bicycle up and down Crow Hill.

Didn’t have 20-speed bicycles at that point.

Nancy:  No, they didn’t. It was a very peaceful, fun existence and I was welcome at all the other houses and I would walk around and I had of course, my dolls and we would – I would play.

You must have developed quite an appreciation for nature up here.

Nancy:  Oh yes.

You couldn’t help but appreciate.

Nancy:  Everybody – one of the occupations was pressing flowers, everybody pressed flowers.

Did you ever travel into Bailey?

Nancy:  Yes, yes we used to travel into Bailey and the General Store, which is there now, was there then.  Going into Bailey was a real treat.

Was the train there at that time?  D you recall the railroad tracks being there?

Robert:  It stopped in ‘37 so you probably don’t remember too well.

Nancy:  I don’t think I remember.

Robert:  You might remember it a little.

Nancy:  I don’t think I remember the train.  I do remember our daily activity though, was walking to the gate because the mail was delivered to a Post Office box on the road.  Our Post Office address was RFD Pine.

Pine.

Nancy:  Pine.

Robert:  That’s close.

Okay, but not Bailey.

Nancy:  But not Bailey and so we’d go down and put our mail in and put up the flag and of course, everybody has mailboxes still up here.

Sure, absolutely.  Very interesting.

Nancy:  But we don’t.  We have to go into Bailey to the Post Office now.  So let’s see, have I …

You mentioned that you had meats and you had chicken and you had veggies; pretty much everything that you needed was produced up here?

Nancy:  We were pretty self-sustaining, yes.

For those two months.

Nancy:  For those two months.

Now the rest of the time, you were living in Denver.

Nancy:  Correct.

What part of Denver were you in?

Nancy:  East Denver.

East Denver.  Toward Aurora?

Nancy:  No, no we lived very close to University Hospital, but we live in a home - - I grew up in a home next to my grandparent’s home that my great-grandfather, Milo Smith, built. And we still live there now.

Oh, that’s interesting.  You lived in a historical environment.  I mean, here as well as when you were in Denver.

Nancy:  That’s correct.

Robert:  It’s a Denver landmark and on the National Register.

Is it really!

Nancy:  Yes, Woody did that; Woody’s a very good historian.

You’re both very interesting in Baldwin and in maintaining historical (inaudible) and locations.

Nancy:  But in the same way that now it takes us an hour from here to our garage, one-half of that time is going across Denver, because we’re four blocks east of Colorado Blvd.

Oh yeah.  I know what that’s like.  We moved out of Parker for that very reason because it became impossible.  It takes me less time to get to downtown Denver now living here than it did living in Parker.

Nancy:  I’m sure that’s true.

That’s progress.

Nancy:  Actually, with C470 it’s not too bad now and the highway’s getting better all the time, thank Heavens.  But when I was a little girl and we would drive up here, it was an endless drive.  It would take – oh…

Robert:  That was the highway before the current one.

Nancy:  Two and a half hours.

During this period of time, this is in the mid thirties, late thirties, and you came up here every summer.

Nancy:  Correct.

And then the place would be shut down you say at Labor Day and be closed up for the rest of the year.

Nancy:  Right.

Did you continue coming up here during the war?

Nancy:  I think we must have, I think we must have because that was the time that the foreman, the ranch foreman, left to go into the military and my father had to use his gas – precious gas stamps – to drive up here and hitch up the horses and do the hay. There was a lot hay to put up in those days.

Okay, so this was an operating ranch then. 

Nancy:  It was an operating - - it’s always been an operating ranch.

I guess I need to understand this Association, how this operates.

Nancy:  I’m going to turn it over to Woody to talk about the Association.

Robert:  The property is very interesting.  It was started, incorporated, in 1888 as a result of Nancy great-father, Milo Smith and another gentleman who had purchased property down in this valley in ’83 when they came up to their copper mine interests.  But anyway, they incorporated in ’88 and originally, it was about 2,000 cares; about half on each side of what’s now Highway 285, which was the old road to - it was called the “Buckskin Route” when there was the stagecoach.  It was the route of the stagecoach.  There was on our property was the old stagecoach stop and the barn, which burned in 1888, and it’s been replaced now with another elegant barn, but that’s the original.

Nancy:  I think you mean 1998.

Robert:  1998, yes. I’m sorry. 1988.  Anyway, the property was incorporated in 1888 and there were originally ten members, stockholders, and of those, five built summer homes from 1889 through 1892, they built these five summer homes.  These were all Easterners who built beach houses in the mountains and they’re not very suitable, but they’re wonderful. 

Was the intent of the incorporation – does it have a ranch for (inaudible)?

Robert:  The intent of the corporation basically was recreation and for the enjoyment of the members but very early on, because of finances, they looked for ways to raise money and actually, their cattle business started in earnest in 1906 when Nancy’s grandfather became President.  At that point, the cattle business started in real earnest with a lot of cattle and they had a resident foreman who took care of the property and took care of the stockholders as well.  They began buying land mostly on upper Deer Creek and at one point, the ranch got to be 3,300 acres; 2,600 of which were on the far side Highway 285.

Okay, so most of it was north of 285.

Robert:  Most of it was north.  On this side of the highway, there are 720 acres and that’s about all it’s ever been on this side.

Basically Deer Creek Valley itself would have been right up the valley.

Robert:  Yes. The property in both cases, both below and above, generally follows the stream.  It’s not a square or rectangle and it just zigzags along and follows the stream all the way up to the almost to where Roy Romer’s ranch is now, but it didn’t go quite that far.  In the early days as Nancy said, the families came up by wagon and the men went back (inaudible).  You were alone when you were growing up, but in the 1890s, Nancy’s grandmother was one of maybe half a dozen or more children of the various families. And they were very active in doing hiking and that they visited Elk Falls and what’s now called Lone Peak; we always called it Mt. Riley.  They would climb and go up to Rosa Lake and places like that.

Sure.

Nancy:  Climbed Mt. Evans.

Robert:  Used to climb Evans.

Oh! Okay.

Robert:  And they would get guides from – what’ the family down by the school?

Fitz…

Nancy:  Fitzsimmons?

Robert:  Fitzsimmons would serve as guides to take them up on Evans and places of that sort.

Nancy:  With pack horses. 

Robert:  Anyway, the cattle business got pretty big, the land got pretty big and things went fairly well until the 20s.  While the urban parts of the world were doing well in the twenties, the rurals were not.  And one point, they had to borrow money from a bank in England to sustain the business and the bank – as soon as the Depression started and following ’29 – the Bank of England attempted to foreclose and so Nancy’s grandfather had to sell personal assets to bail out the corporation.  He had a great interest in the Association. 

The next generation of young people your mother’s age, was also fairly sizeable.  One family, the Hover family, had nine children and they were all about the same age – well, same age as your mother and then ?Red Wolf?.  The stockholders changed over the years; at one point, it turned out that there were only four stockholders four Colorado and the rest all lived back east and there was a conflict between the two.  So a couple of local stockholders bought out the Eastern stockholders and all of this leads up to the point - - there became an inequity in the stock and this gave rise to a lawsuit many years later, which sort of put a damper on things up here, but it was resolved.

What time frame was that that this lawsuit…

Robert:  The lawsuit came about in ’46.  This is the result of - - Nancy talks about her father coming up and cutting the hay when the foreman left.  He decided he could do that one summer, but not again and so the Board of Directors of the Association decided to sell 2,600 acres, everything north of the highway.  They did that over the objection of two stockholders and those are the two stockholders that sued and said that the Corporation was not serving their interests and so forth.  The result was there was a distribution of stock to all stockholders which helped a little bit, but not a great deal.

Who bought the land then on the north side of 285?

Robert:  Okay, the 2,600 on the other side of the highway was purchased by a gentleman by the name of Cordell Richardson, who led then ?Roggen?  And he attempted to operate it as a ranch and was very unsuccessful and within eighteen months, he started selling it off; he eventually sold most of it – or all of it in fact – to Dozier.

This is in the mid-forties then?

Robert:  Late forties.  He probably sold – I think it was – I think the sale to Dozier was about 1949.  This is the …

Nancy:  The father of Bud Dozier.

Right, exactly.

Robert:  And of course, Dozier accumulated a lot of other property and we understood at one point, he owned nearly ten square miles of … but all of that property that was formed by the Association, which included the Coal Springs, was Dozier’s.

The Association continued to function down here?

Robert:  Yes.  There was a lot of turmoil in the Association because of whether should be disbanded or anything, but they really settled into running the 720 acres.  At this point, the Association would hire people to lease the property for running cattle or horse and putting up the hay and this process went on for many years and it was a very peaceful situation.  At that point, there were seven or eight families.

What time is this roughly?

Robert:  We’re talking from about 1949 through almost to 1980. It was a very peaceful period of time.  The agricultural use was all handled by outsiders and we’d earn small amounts of pay for that from the lease and from the hay but the Association itself did not actively take part in the agricultural production.  Then in 19 - - during this time Nancy’s father was president and in fact, he remained president for many, many years.  He was a member of the Association for forty-some years.

In 1981, our middle son, John, graduated from CSU in Animal Husbandry and he proposed to the Board of Directors that he would like to take over the lease of the property.  He had had some experience in college working at the T-Cross Ranch out of Colorado Springs raising quarter horses and that’s what he wanted to do so in 1981, he embarked on raising quarter horses up here. That was only marginally successfully and to supplement his income, he took a job driving a school bus in the winter. This is interesting because when he was small and we first came up here in the sixties, there were no families other than Ed Howard, within five miles of us.  There was nothing in Roland Valley; there was nothing in what is now Burland; there was nothing up above. When he was driving a school bus, he found that it took two school busses to take the kids out of the loop around the Association, so things had changed a great deal.

As I recall, the first development in what’s now Burland, was made by …Cobb’s partner, Stebbins and that was about 1960.  So that was the first of the developing around here.  In 1981, he embarked on the horse racing and in conjunction with that, he was very active in the 4-H and a year or two later, they developed the equestrian park over in Burland and unknown to most people, it had an unofficial name; it was the John Woodward Equestrian Park for a few hours (laughter).  He has the sign and we have pictures of that, but all and all, the horse business didn’t last very well and when he lost his best mare, he decided to switch to cattle. From that point forward, this became a cattle ranch and it’s been relatively successful under his direction.

He’s living here year-round?

Robert:  He lives here year-round; he moved in and winterized a mobile home in ’81 and he runs cattle, hay and as his herd increased, he didn’t have enough – 720 acres is not very much for raising cattle, so he started leasing property and at different time, he leased to Farmer’s Union, he leased the park up Elk Creek and currently he’s leasing most of Dozier’s land.

That would be west of Pine Junction?

End side A

Start side B

So he’s raising cattle now?

Robert:  He’s raising cattle now; he raises more than a hundred head plus an equal number of calves; he puts up hay on the acreage here as well as the leased property and he makes a fairly decent living, although you never get rich in the cattle business in the mountains.

I would think not.  That would be tough.  Does the Association still have members?  They are stockholders essentially?

Robert:  Yeah.  At this point, over the years , particularly during the period that we talked about (’49 into the seventies) it began to begin a consolidation as members lost interest or died and sold stock or transferred stock and so forth, so that at this point there are ten stockholders.  They are part of only two families; Nancy’s great-father and his family, including Nancy and myself and our three children and a family by the name of Dickson who are descendants of the Hover who was one of the early members, though not original. There are Stella and her three children own the stock.  The tenth stockholder is a Hover, which is part of the same family, but he’s been dead for seventeen years but they’ve not anything with his stock, so he’s had sort of an interesting time!

It’s just held in the estate apparently then, right?

Robert:  His stock was never transferred to his estate, so it just sort of hangs in limbo.  But there are ten stockholders – our family owns two of that, summer houses, the Dicksons owns three of the summer houses; the principal stockholders, the younger generation are six men – boys…

Nancy:  Men!

Robert:  Men  (laughter) yeah and they’re wonderful with each other and I think they all want the Association to remain as it is and in that direction where they’ve been looking at methods to sell, develop, or give away development rights so that this cannot be ever subdivided.  And we’re getting great support from the County.

I know driving up here through this road here, it’s beautiful land.  It’s just absolutely beautiful.

Robert:  So it’s the plan of the six future members of the Association that property remain as it is.  John has a long-term lease.  A couple of years ago, he built a peel-log home and just got married two weeks ago, so…

Nancy:  Probably one week ago!

Robert:  One week ago, yeah.

That’s right, you mentioned it was just last weekend.

Nancy:  Just last Saturday, yeah.  One interesting thing is John, for several winters, worked for the Ski Association up on Guanella, the name of which - - what was the name of the Ski Area up there, which was ultimately burned down.

Robert:  Yes.

There was a ski slope on Guanella?

Robert:  Yes, on Guanella Pass.

Nancy:  Yes, yes and I can’t for the life of me come up - - but there was a - - the Forest Service I think ultimately burned it down and…

Robert:  That was in his early years up here when he was still having a little trouble making ends meet.

Nancy:  Right, in the eighties, but that ski area has been closed for a number of years. It’s gone.

Robert:  He also is a volunteer fireman and for five years, was the Fire Chief of the Platte Canon Fire Department.  He’s an Assistant Chief today; the Chief just took too much of his time.

That’s very much a full-time job.

Robert:  He’s been an Assistant Chief for four or five years now.

Nancy:  At least maybe ten.

Robert:  Yeah, and his bride is also a member of the Fire Department.

Has this area ever been logged?

Nancy:  Yes.

Do you ever have logging occur on this property?

Robert:  Yes, back about - - it was fairly early in my experience I believe; it was ’58 or ’59, it came to our attention that there were many mature jack pine, particularly on the north side of the property and although there had been evidence of logging back in the 1870s, which were probably cut for railroad ties (that was common in those days) but nothing had been done sine then. So in ’59 we contracted with a logging outfit that came in and for one winter, they cut mature jack pines out.  They set up two sawmills on the lower part of the property and cut the lumber to dimension on the site and trucked it out and I don’t recall the board feet, but it was thousands of board feet that was taken out that year.  There’s been no logging - - well, the only logging since then there was a period in the seventies when we had a lot of pine beetle (inaudible) and quite a number of pine beetle trees were cut and removed.

When they logged before, you said they set two mills up here.  Did they clear-cut or did they selectively cut certain trees?

Robert:  Selectively cut.  They didn't clear-cut any place. Their purpose was to cut mature trees to leave more space, air, sun, whatever for the smaller trees.

Right. Thinning it.

Robert:  And they left very little evidence of the cutting other than the stumps.

Nancy:  Other than the piles of slash which were …

Oh yeah.

Robert:   Yeah, the piles of slash where the sawmills are still there.

Oh really.

Robert:  Yes, they’re pretty good size.  There was one interesting thing about that.  This was done in the wintertime and of course, they had a road from the Highway 285 down to the sawmill, which was about two miles. The ?trailers? were all over the place and many on the other side of the stream, so they had a number mules and they would cut a tree and dimension-cut it to log size and fasten it to the mules and the mules would pull it up the hill, as the sawmill sat up on top of a hill would pull it.  And the mules would, unattended, would pull those logs up to the sawmill and they would take them back and do it again.

And this is in the 1950s.

Robert:  1958, yeah.

Wow.  I didn’t ‘think they still used animals that most recently.

Robert:  Yeah.

They still did.

Robert:  I hadn’t been around too many years at that point and it was very fascinating to watch.

Nancy:  Well, the fire danger now, that looks like a very wise thing to have done and we probably should do it again.

Robert:  Yes.

Well, exactly.  I mean, did you experience fires up here?  You were here in the thirties and forties.

Nancy:  No, I’ve never experienced a fire on our property in my lifetime.

Wow.

Nancy:  But you look at the old pictures up here and these hills are nearly bare, although there’s no evidence of burning, so we don’t know whether the weather was drier or…

Robert:  But there was very few trees.

Nancy:  Or what accounted for the fact that there were - - particularly aspen.

Robert:  It was either heavy timbering or fire early on.

I saw pictures of Glen isle Resort that were taken at the time it was first built and there’s hardly any trees around it.

Robert:  That’s right.

Nancy:  That’s right and that would have been a similar time frame.

Robert:  1870s, 80s, 90s, there were very few trees up here.

I wonder why that is. In fact they were saying that the spruce trees and the Douglas fir trees are not native.

Robert:  Yeah.

It’s the ponderosa pine that was really native and they’ve really been kind of crowded out by some of these spruce and fir.

Nancy:  Really!  I can’t imagine that anybody came and planted them.  That doesn’t…

I think the conditions maybe have changed…

Robert:  The problem with the spruce is that we can’t get anybody to cut them because they’re not very good firewood.  They’ll cut the jack pine ponderosa because they make good firewood.

That jack pine is a ponderosa?

Robert:  Yes.

Nancy:  Yeah.

Okay.

Robert:  But the spruce are not good burning trees and then we have an overabundance of spruce today.

Absolutely, and they grow - - there’s two problems with them: one’s they grow very thick which means they’re very dense and secondly, they have the lowest growth remains very close to the ground.

Robert:  Yes.

Whereas a ponderosa will drop its trunk and it will be very tall and it withstands fire.  These things act like torches.

Robert:  A ponderosa forest, you can walk through like a park.

Nancy:  I was going to say when Milo Smith, my great-grandfather, built the house in Denver, he brought down three blue spruce from the property and they are growing in our yard to this day.

Still growing!

Nancy:  And they are well over a hundred years old now.

Well, they grow very slowly.

Nancy:  And they are enormous and two of them are really ugly and one of them is quite beautiful (laughter). So there must have been some trees up here because he brought them down from here.

Robert:  Another area we haven’t talked is interesting is the roadways. The old road that I mentioned before started as a stagecoach road.

This is what is 285 today?

Robert:  West 285.  And then somewhere along in about the teens I believe it was, they made it a highway, I think it was Highway 120 or something before it became 285. It was close but not exactly where it is today and I think during the teens – 1915 or so, the County proposed a road up Deer Creek and then over to Elk Creek, which cut diagonally through the Association property.  Initially the Association opposed this road and finally some of the members felt that it was appropriate to donate the land to the County and make friends instead of enemies, so the right-of-way was donated for what is now Highway 43, which went right through the middle of the Association property.

So that was donated land from the Association.

Robert:  That was donated land. The land for the original US Highway 10 I believe it was, was essentially I think the Association (inaudible) a dollar for it for that right-of-way.  Then in 1958, the current highway was put in and though along here, it’s not too much different than it was originally, it did change things and we lost some property, gained some property and the …

Nancy:  You were going to talk about the stagecoach stop and the chimney for that.

Robert:  Yeah, there was a stagecoach stop just a little ways north of Deer Creek on the Old Stage Road.  It was built in 1861 I understand and it was used until the railroad got to Bailey, which would have been about 1878.  From that point on, the stagecoach stopped running in this area.

It came up from Denver?

Robert:  Yeah, the stagecoach went from Denver through it was called Deer Valley and then it went on over Kenosha Pass and eventually to Fairplay and I think it dead-end - - stopped at Buckskin Joe and then eventually went over into what’s now Leadville.  It wasn’t Leadville in those days.

My gosh, they went over Mosquito Pass then?

Robert:  Yes.

Oohh, okay.

Robert:  The stagecoach stop in 1870 – something – two or three – was also a designated the Post Office and it was called Deer Valley.  But once the train got to Bailey, the Post Office was moved to Bailey and that signaled the end of the stagecoach stop, Post Office, the whole works. The building , which was a small cabin with a rather elegant, big stone fireplace eventually deteriorated and at one point, Nancy’s grandmother had it filled with concrete to preserve it .

Nancy:  The fireplace that is.

Robert:  And when I first came on the scene, which would have in ’53, the chimney stood between the current highway and the old Stagecoach road.

Which was north or south of the existing highway.

Robert:  It would have been north.

North, okay.

Robert:  Just a few feet; just a little ways. Well, north of the old highway. Actually, when the new right-of-way went in, they widened that right-of-way and they – at that point – the chimney was knocked down and buried and became part of the base of the highway.

Nancy:  You know, another interesting thing is that Horn Cemetery originated as a burial ground because of the stagecoach.

Robert:  The cemetery is very interesting.  There’s a story – folklore or whatever – that someone at the stagecoach was shot and crawled out of the stage stop at Deer Valley and crawled up the hill and when he got to the top of the hill, he apparently died. So he was buried on the spot and that according to the story, is the beginning of the Horn Cemetery.  The property in those days was owned by the Horn family.

Okay, they were homesteaders here?

Robert:  Yeah.  Much of Deer Valley, the original Deer Valley park Association – was purchased from the Horn family and so over the years, that cemetery got more and more use and in 1888, when the Association was incorporated, the Association deeded one acre to the County for a cemetery, which is the Horn Cemetery.  It was fenced but ironically, even though we have a copy of the deed, it was never recorded and so as things went on, it was in the 1970s, there was a family who didn't even live around here, complained that the ranchers were destroying the cemetery. 

Well, what had happened is that over the years, the fence had gone into bad repair; there was no lock on the gate and poachers found that an easy way to get into our property.  They would drive in through the cemetery and then cross the graves into our property and drive down and fish. Nancy and I chased one car out that did exactly that.  We found about - - in the 1980s, the cemetery people wanted to expand the cemetery. Although they couldn’t prove they owned it, they wanted to make it bigger!

Now it’s a County-owned cemetery, isn’t it?

Robert:  It is. 

Is there an association like a caretaker association?

Robert:  There’s a Cemetery Board.

Nancy:  There is now.

Robert:  That locally runs it.

Okay, so an active cemetery.

Nancy:  Oh yes. It became an active cemetery actually.  All the time I was growing up…

Robert:  It was not active until they eighties.

Nancy:  At all for years.

Robert:  And what happened was that an investigation - - we started looking at what property could we give to the County to enlarge the cemetery?  On one side is a spring where we get water or we feed our cattle, so we can’t go that way.  The other side is REA right-of-way. The third side is a rock outcropping and the cliff, fourth side, is the highway; there’s not much room to expand.

Right.

Robert:  But was also found in investigating that we’ve been paying taxes on that property for over a hundred years! (laughter).

That’s good! (jokingly)

Robert:  Although in computing the tax, for the – I think it was 1990 – it was about fifty cents, so we didn’t worry too much about that.  Anyway, the result of that is that County put a new fence in, new gate, lock, marked it, put the name on it, and it actively began to use the cemetery.  They removed it from our tax bill.

That’s good.

Robert:  And then eight or nine years later, we deeded them another half-acre, which they have failed to use, but they own that half-acre more than has currently been used.

Okay.

Nancy:  The cemetery was one of my favorite places when I was a little girl and I used to go up there and clean it up every summer; take all the dead trees and branches out and just try to keep it neat and clean and there was then – and there still is – some burial spot for a child, which has a little white fence around it and somebody in recent years has either replaced it or renewed it and it looks wonderful now.

Are there headstones with dates and their (inaudible?

Nancy:  No, no, there’s no identification on it.

Robert:  It’s a very active cemetery.

Really!

Robert:  There are burials up there from the 1860s, although I don’t think they’re identified.

Nancy:  But there are crosses all over, because someone came in and plotted where the old burials were; in fact, some of them are right down the highway right-of-way.

Yeah, in fact I think I talked to one gentleman who said they’re definitely burial sites outside of the fence.

Robert:  Yes.

Nancy:  Yes, absolutely

Robert:  That used to be part of the cemetery and then they moved the highway, they widened the right-of-way they took part of the cemetery.

Nancy:  One of the problems with their widening the highway again now…

Exactly.  I don’t know where they would go.

Nancy:  Yeah, that would be a bit of a problem there.

For sure.

Nancy:  We’ll let them figure that out.

Yeah, exactly.  So what other memories do you have down here as a child from say the late thirties into the forties.  Did you ever bring friends from Denver up here?

Nancy:  When I was older, when I was a teenager I used to bring friends up when the War ended and the gas became more available.

Right.

Nancy:  One of my memorable yeas though, was in about 194 – what – maybe six? seven? five?  When the polio epidemic struck in Colorado and I was - - it was very serious and hundreds and hundreds of children were affected and I was at a summer camp that year and the girl

Not up here?

Nancy:  No, no near Colorado Springs in the Black Forest and my bunkmate came down with paralytic polio and so several children at the camp did.  So they called all the parents, who came and got us I spent the rest of the summer up here.

What year was that?

Robert:  ‘46.

Nancy:  It was in the mid-forties.

Robert:  ‘46.

I didn’t know there was a polio epidemic at that point.

Robert:  Yes, quite serious.

It was in the fifties that they came up with a polio vaccine, wasn’t it?

Nancy:  Yes, I think so because by the time our kids started coming along, polio was…

Robert:  1946 was a tough time in Denver because that fall, was the polio - - that summer was the polio epidemic and then that fall – I don’t remember which order – there was a national coal strike and they closed the schools because they couldn’t heat them and then sometime later that fall, they had a big snow.

Nancy:  The blizzard of ’46, which paralyzed the city.

Robert:  Yes.

Okay.

Robert:  So that was a tough year all the way around.

Absolutely. (inaudible).

Robert:  We were both high school – well, I was just entering high school; you would have been in junior high –

Nancy:  But the only memorable snow experience we had up here was Labor Day of 1961.

Robert:  Yes.

Labor Day!

Nancy:  Labor Day, which was like the 3rd of September that year and my grandmother, who was ninety plus, was  - - we were at the other cabin then, was there and my parents and our selves and our three little boys, who were really little at that point.

Robert:  Paul was three.

Nancy:  Three, five and six and the night before Labor Day, my parents and Woody and I sat down to play a game of bridge and we were by the fire and we looked out the window and the snow was falling heavily and we said, “Oh, isn’t this beautiful.” It’s just so romantic sort of sitting by the fire with the snow falling, which lasted for awhile until the wires went down and the electricity was cut off.

A wet snow.

Nancy:  And my grandmother had gone to bed sometime before with her electric blanket on and the boys were already in bed, the little boys, and the next morning we woke up to about…

Robert:  Eighteen inches.

Nancy:  Eighteen inches of snow and we inquired of my grandmother if she had been comfortable and she said, “Because I had my electric blanket on and I was nice and warm.” But we had to get out.  I mean, here we were – we were nearly out of food…

Robert:  Four generations.

Nancy:  Four generations; we had no water; we had no phone; no electricity and the next morning, early…

Robert:  Nancy’s father and I decided we would try and see if we could get out the road, so we didn’t have much in the way of winter clothes, but we both had fishing hip-boots! So we put the fishing hip-boots on and went out with shovels.

Nancy:  And saws!

Robert:  Yes and we carried a chain saw and we started down the road towards the highway and that house is about three-quarters of a mile from the highway; not as far as this one.  And the aspen, which had been in full leaf, had of course had all fallen across the rest of the road.  So we would have to cut trees, shovel snow, and we proceeded doing that all the way to the highway.  Now, we started fairly early in the morning; I don’t know – eight or so. We reached the highway just about noon.  We were exhausted!

I can imagine.

Robert:  But we had cut all the trees that were down between the house. Then we walked back to the house; decided we would - - we had two cars. We had an old Chevrolet station wagon that was built on a truck chassis; it was sort of the forerunner of the SUV I guess. But we didn’t have any tire chains or snow tires or anything like that, but we found two pieces of chain in the barn which I wired to the wheels and I got in and went - - Nancy went out; she got the hip-boots in the second go-around and so I revved the engine up and would drive it until the car would be stopped by the snow bank. Then I’d back off and Nancy and her father would shovel that out.

Nancy:  And dig it – dig it out from the interior of the car; the packing around the radiator.

Robert:  And then I’d rev the engine up and drive again until it was stopped and we did that all the way to the highway.  And it was late afternoon, almost 5 o’clock, when we got the first car to the highway.

My gosh, you spent the whole day!

Robert:  So then we left that car, took the chains off, went back, put them on Nancy’s folk’s car and put the ninety year-old grandmother and the three little kids in it and went through this process again, because that car was much lower so it had to be…

That’s hard to imagine.  That’s an end of the…

Robert:  We thought for sure we weren’t gong to make it; that it was - - well, what we found when we finally got to the highway was the highway was clear! Nobody had thought there was anything wrong; we got to Denver; nobody knew there’d been a snowstorm…

It was right here.

Robert:  It was right here!

Nancy:  Right here! (laughing).

Robert:  And we thought we were fighting for our life and it turned out we were the only ones (laughter).

So it was a very busy day.

Nancy:  The other inhabitants of these cabins, like the one here, had a water tank on the hill with a gravity feed so they had water. They had aplenty of food…

Robert:  And booze.

Nancy:  Plenty of booze and they didn’t care if they were snowed in.

Robert:  They were all adults; there were no children.

So they had planned on staying for awhile longer anyway, so…

Nancy:  Right.

Robert:  They just sat it out.

Nancy:  We were the only ones with a - - that had to fight for our lives.  Pummel it down.  It was - - I imagine though that there were lots of people that were up in this area on that Labor Day who probably have similar memories of that time.

It seems very unusual to have that much snow that early in the season.

Nancy:  Oh yes.

Were winters more severe do you think years ago?

Nancy:  Yes! Sure!  I’m sure they were.

I mean, everybody says that.

Nancy:  When we both were kids in Denver, we lived near City Park and our winter recreation was ice-skating on City Park Lake. And we did this it seemed like, all winter and they never have that.  It’s never cold enough.

It’s not that cold now.

Robert:  Yup. The past few years particularly have been very dry and very warm.

Nancy:  Yeah, now we have lots and lots of pictures of my parents and grandparents driving up here during the winter and pictures of the car and there’s lots of snow.

Why would they come up here in winter?

Nancy:  They were intrepid; I don’t know.  They loved it up there.  This has always been such a special place for every member of our family; it’s, you know - - and I don’t think we’ll ever cease to appreciate it, it’s just really special.

That’s great. You wouldn’t want to see a subdivision being built in here, that’s for sure.

Nancy:  We would not want to see a subdivision.  We’re not even enthusiastic about the elementary school that may be built up the hill because it’s very close to use.

Robert:  It’s very close to the houses. We’ve tried to buy that property or trade that property from the School Board and had been unsuccessful.  We’ve offered them Highway 285 frontage and all kinds of things to give us that eighty acres, but we’ve been unsuccessful.

Nancy:  We have experienced in person some of the joys of Park County politics!

Well, if you’ve been here any length of time, you can’t avoid them.

Nancy:  No, that’s absolutely true.  What other wonderful things can we tell you?  How many deer and elk we see all the time?

End Side B

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