Tag: history
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Flying W Ranch: A western tradition triumphs over tragedy in Colorado Springs
The crowd has moved through the line, filling trays with chicken, brisket, potatoes, beans, biscuits and applesauce made just the way an adoring mother made it more than 70 years ago. Now the people are back at their seats, back at the picnic tables lining this dining hall at a historic ranch in Colorado Springs,…
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‘Granddaddy of Colorado Rodeos’ honors deep tradition in the west
Photos from 100 years ago show cowboys on horseback lining Gunnison’s main street, which was dirt in those days. Tyler Hansen likes to look at these photos, to see his western Colorado hometown how it used to be. “It was just an Old West town,” he said. For a week every July, Gunnison resembles that…
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‘Our history matters’: Downtown walking tours open window to past
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…
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Pikes Peak Granite Company was Woodland Park landmark
By Steve Plutt The Pikes Peak Granite Company was founded in Woodland Park in August of 1952 by Lawrence Noga. Situated on the southern side of Midland Avenue immediately east of West Street, it was an elongated structure featuring tar-shingled siding and numerous windows. Inside, it featured an exceptionally high ceiling with large exposed wooden…
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Labor on parade: Remembering what the Labor Day holiday is all about
By Devin FloresHistory Colorado The first Labor Day was a grassroots event organized by workers in New York City on Sept. 5, 1882. Over 10,000 workers — one in every 200 people in the city at that time — turned out to march in a parade from City Hall to an uptown park where they…
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Templeton Gap’s story goes back to the city’s earliest days and before
Drivers travel Templeton Gap Road. Hikers and bikers follow the Templeton Gap Trail and water comes down the Templeton Gap Floodway. But what exactly is the gap? And who was the Templeton who went through that gap? Its story goes far back before the founding of Colorado Springs, to Indigenous times of Native Americans, possibly…
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Map quest: New book brings centuries-old maps to light in tracing little-known Colorado history
P.J. Anderson spent the better part of two years tracking down hundreds of maps long predating Colorado’s statehood in 1876 as part of a mission that took him to private collections, museums and institutions near and far. This included the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. “Getting ushered into the back rooms where they keep…
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Colorado’s Bent’s Old Fort is ‘endangered.’ Officials are reimagining its future
On Colorado’s southeast plains, a relic of the Old West could be significantly rehabilitated or rebuilt. Or some of the adobe building could be retained or all of it torn down, with only a marked “footprint” between trails, signs and exhibits telling of a bustling trading post that rose here in 1833. These are possibilities…
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The folly and fate of the ‘Solid Muldoon’
Mystery swirled around the discovery of a petrified giant, but was it the find of a lifetime or the greatest fake of its age? By Ann Sneesby-KochHistory Colorado William Conant seemingly unearthed a marvel in September 1877. While searching for fossils near Beulah, Colorado, Conant had stopped for lunch when his attention was attracted by…
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World War II dive bombers take flight over Colorado Springs
Hundreds of military aviation and history buffs gathered at the National Museum of World War II Aviation before daybreak on Thursday to witness history in the making as the only three airworthy WWII Curtiss SB2C Helldiver aircraft took to the skies over the Pikes Peak region. Dive bombers from Fagen Fighters WWII Museum in Minnesota…