Local Lore

Presenting the madams of Central Colorado

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Article by Ed Quillen

Local Lore – September 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine

PUT HALF A DOZEN women on a stage, recalling their careers from an era when there weren’t many career options for women in Central Colorado, and you’ve got the basis for a production that has been playing to packed houses this summer.

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Granite loses post office, but will still be an address

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Brief by Central Staff

Local Lore – April 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine

Granite, which sits along the Arkansas River between Buena Vista and Leadville, no longer has a post office. But residents there can still get mail at Granite addresses — street addresses, though, rather than post-office boxes.

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Promotion from 100 years ago

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Letter from David Delling

Local Lore – January 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine

Dear Colorado Central:

I recently came across an 1897 promotional flyer concerning Salida. I am enclosing a copy which I think might be of interest to you. Toss it or use it any way you like. I’m a long-time subscriber and always enjoy Colorado Central.

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Grape Creek Canyon: A brief overview

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Sidebar by Gary Ziegler

Local Lore – January 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine

Carving a deep groove through the ancient metamorphic rock of the Wet Mountains, Custer County’s Grape Creek gathers the runoff from a multitude of mountain streams flowing down from the nearby Sangre de Cristo Range.

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One for the trivia buffs

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Brief by Central Staff

Local Lore – November 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine

It often happens that you find something interesting when you’re looking up something else. This time around, the research diversion took us to Sally Blane, an actress who appeared in many low-budget movies of the 1930s, ranging from Once a Sinner in 1930 to This is the Life in 1935 before she married director Norman Foster and pretty much retired from the screen.

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Other Sawatch Peaks have their legends

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Sidebar by Ed Quillen

Local Lore – December 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

ANGELIC MOUNT SHAVANO isn’t the only peak in the Sawatch Range with a legend.

At the south end of the range near Marshall Pass is Mount Ouray, which just misses 14er status; it’s 13,971 feet high. On its east side is an immense glacial cirque or cwm (pronounced koom; it comes from Welsh and it can be a handy word in a Scrabble game).

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Tracing the source of the Angel legend

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Sidebar by Martha Quillen

Local Lore – December 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

THE LEGEND of the Angel of Shavano varies considerably, depending upon who’s doing the telling, but Harrington’s version is fairly faithful to a fable created by Corinne Harpending in the 1920s, and recirculated ever since.

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The legend of the Angel of Shavano

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Article by Eleanor Perry Harrington

Local Lore – December 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

HIGH ABOVE THE Upper Arkansas Valley on Mt. Shavano lies an angel sketched in snow. Each spring as the warm sun melts the snow surrounding her, the angel patiently waits. Finally, the snow in her deep crevices stands out sharply on the mountainside reminding the people below that once again she has come to provide moisture for their crops and stock when the streams and rivers run low.

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Recent encounters at the Yellow House of Maysville

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Brief by Reggie Morton

Local lore – December 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

While no real rival to Lynda La Rocca’s address in the “Stupid Zone,” we on U.S. 50, a.k.a. Th’ Backbone o’ ‘Murica, see our share of interesting droppers-by. My Dear Wife, the urbanite, tells me that this is nothing special, but as someone who has never before lived on a thoroughfare big enough to have painted lines, I’m continually amazed by our drop-in guests.

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Doom Bus meets doom in Manhattan

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Brief by Central Staff

Local lore – October 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

A piece of Salida lore, a fixture in local parades for nearly two decades, is now rusting in an impound lot in New York City. The “Doommobile” made it across the continent, and to the Republican National conventions in 1988 and 2000 – but it didn’t survive the 2004 convention and the intense security.

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Looking for lore about Spikebuck

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Letter from Meezie And Dick Stacy

Local lore – March 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Quillen,

Last week I received your subscription-renewal postcard for Colorado Central, which I immediately returned, along with my check for $20. On that card there was a blurb about a bighorn sheep that was shot near Spikebuck in 1807. This reminded me of a humorous story that my wife, Mary Louise (Meezie) once told me about Spikebuck, as we passed the railroad junction box so labeled while driving along the Arkansas River on our way to Cañon City. I thought that the story might interest you, so I asked her to write it up for me and here it is:

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Ghosts in ghost towns and a UFO in New Mexico

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Sidebar by Ken Jessen

Local Lore – January 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

Certainly, in visiting over 600 abandoned town sites in the American West, I have had some very eerie feelings. This is especially true when I am alone poking inside some old miner’s shack on a dark overcast day near dusk. Might ghosts live in ghost towns? It certainly seems logical, but I have never seen a ghost in a ghost town. However, in the quiet solitude of the mountains, I can be startled by the sound of a piece of corrugated sheet metal flapping in the wind.

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The Galloping Ghost

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Sidebar by Wendell Hutchinson

Local Lore – January 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

A beautiful woman lived in the upper end of the San Luis Valley. Her home was in the wooded timber area between Villa Grove and the top of Poncha Pass. I can remember the remains of the house along the south side of the highway. My great uncle Bailey pointed it out to me one day when we were chasing cows in that region.

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Why the ghosts are coming out now

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Sidebar by Martha Quillen

Local Lore – January 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

Way back in September, Colorado Central asked writer-formerly-in-residence, Columbine Quillen (who continues to labor for the home team on occasion), to collect a few local ghost stories to round out our Hallowe’en feature. But as it turned out, our main feature was a little longer than expected.

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Ghost Stories

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Article by Columbine Quillen

Local lore – January 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine

ASK ABOUT GHOSTS In Salida and you’ll hear plenty of stories. Some say the old bookstore used to be haunted, the Lovelace, the First Street Café, the Odd Fellows Hall, or perhaps even most of the buildings on First Street, and many of the upstairs apartments overlooking F Street. But Amícas, over on Second Street, seems to house the most spooks.

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Those were different times

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Article by Orville Wright

Local lore – December 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine

BEING TIED UP (down) by three surgeries this summer has left me with too much time on my hands. I still can’t exercise and I’m getting fed up with sitting in a lounger reading books and watching the idiot lantern. As a result, my mind is working overtime and the word processor is really catching it.

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Ghosts

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Article by Chas S. Clifton

Local Lore – November 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine

LAST SPRING, a check came for me from Leland Feitz, owner of Little London Press in Colorado Springs. “Little London” was an 1890s nickname for Colorado Springs, coined when the city was flush with British mining capital and had its own stock exchange. Feitz publishes short books on local history, and in 1982, he turned a newspaper feature series that I had written into Ghost Tales of Cripple Creek.

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Perhaps EXport 5 would work better

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Brief by Central Staff

Local lore – April 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine

When he was about 10 years old, our publisher learned pi to 32 places (3.14159265358979…), thereby impressing his teachers and starting a lifetime habit of accumulating rather useless information. Since then, alas, he seems to have developed a mild case of numeric dyslexia.

The most recent victim is Suzanne MacDonald, who used to own Creekside Books in Buena Vista. She sold the store a few years ago and went to law school in Denver. Now she’s back in Buena Vista with her own law office, and like all enlightened entrepreneurs, she purchased an advertisement in this magazine.

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The Great Salida Badger Fight

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Article by Roger Henn

Local Lore – July 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine

IT WAS DURING the Depression, and our family was so poor we didn’t even have an automobile. Wherever we had to go, we generally either walked or rode our bikes.

We boys made astonishingly long trips on bicycles. These were without the fancy gears of today’s machines, and going uphill meant pushing the pedals a lot harder than going on the level. The king of bikes in that day was the Iver Johnson, a hardy bike that — like the Model T Ford — was available only in black. It could hold up under the day-after-day task of carrying the 150 or so newspapers we carried on Denver Post routes.

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Those erstwhile county seats

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Brief by Central Staff

Local Lore – May 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine

At some point, we’ll try to get official with these quizzes and give away T-shirts or something to the winners. But that would mean having rules and deadlines, none of which we’ve contrived yet.

In the April edition, we asked about old county seats, and here are the answers (our official source was Historical Atlas of Colorado):

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Can you recognize these places?

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Brief by Central Staff

Local Lore – May 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine

The following are all published descriptions of places in Central Colorado or the San Luis Valley. Can you figure out what they’re writing about?

1.) “Sheep and cattle-raising, however, are the principal occupations of the settlers, about one-half of whom are Spanish-Mexicans, and live in adobe houses, surrounded by cattle, sheep, goats, babies and dogs. The town consists principally of adobe and log buildings, yet there are a few good brick and stone buildings for business purposes…”

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Guess that intersection

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Brief by Central Staff

Local Lore – February 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine

In the January edition, we published a short quiz about slogans, and promised to run the answers if we remembered. Our mental circuits did suffer greatly from the shock of the monthly bill from the Greedy Gas Co. (which was once owned by the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow), but have since recovered to this extent:

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George Roche III, former Salida teacher, in a sex scandal

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Brief by Central Staff

Local Lore – January 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine

Hillsdale College was recently rocked by a national scandal involving its long-time president. It’s in Michigan, about 80 miles west of Detroit — and that’s 1,100 miles from here — but there is a strong connection. Central Colorado is where that president of Hillsdale College grew up and first worked, and our region is a place he wrote about.

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Eagle Scout cleans Elephant Rock

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Brief by Central Staff

Local lore – October 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine

To become an Eagle Scout, a Boy Scout needs to complete a major project. Cameron Randall of Buena Vista took one on last summer — removing the graffiti from Elephant Rock, a landmark a couple of miles north of Buena Vista near the Midland Tunnels.

He started on August 3, and got a lot of assistance along the way from fellow scouts, church members, and various businesses and public entities. And now there’s a sign on the landmark, explaining a bit of its history.

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Attention FATs, EYEs, and EARs

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Brief by Central Staff

Local Lore – May 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine

Attention FATs, EYEs, and EARs

In a recent edition of the Wet Mountain Tribune of Westcliffe, we saw a headline that referred to a Wetmore resident as a “Wetmoron.”

That ranks up there with our favorite Colorado geographic appelation — Lamar residents who call themselves “Lamartians.”

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Reminisces of the old Pioneer Club

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Letter by Jim Ludwig

Local Lore – December 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine

Bats, the old Pioneer Club, and much, much more

Ed and Martha:

I found your November issue, with the exception of one piece of correspondence, to be the best that I have seen. The choice of subjects, the book reviews and regional comments were excellent. I realize that I may not be your mainstream reader, but thanks for a great issue.

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