Before the Cowen Center on Highway 133 there was Gracie Cowen.
And a few cows, dogs, cats and junk cars — one of which was a Model T Ford that can still be seen chugging up and down the Crystal River Valley after its owner repainted it brown and black.
Gracie lived on 11 acres near Highway 133 before developers bought the property, and put Cowen Drive in at Eighth Street rerouting it to the highway. She was born in 1912 and lived alone until her death at 93 years old at Heritage Park Care Center in 2006. She recounted her life in Anita McCune Witt’s 1998 book, “They Came from Missouri: The History of Missouri Heights Colorado.”
An only child, Gracie and her father and mother (Sherman and Katherine) moved to Missouri Heights in 1917 where they homesteaded 680 acres of mostly sage and scrub oak, “but we cultivated about ninety acres up above what is [now] Mike Strang’s place,” Gracie is quoted. She started school at the one-room Missouri Heights Schoolhouse in 1918, but was only there for a few weeks because her mother got sick and she had to stay at home to care for her.
“The next year I went back to school, but things weren’t good. I had lived on the farm with just my parents and had never been around other children,” Gracie recalled. “I guess I didn’t know how to act around others and the kids began to tease me and pick on me.” The teacher wouldn’t let Gracie go outside for recess and made her eat lunch at her desk.
When she told her mother, she was told, “You go back tomorrow and get your books and come home. You don’t have to go back!” Things were better at school the next year and enrollment swelled to 30. Mary Ferguson was her teacher and there were only three kids in eighth grade: Loel Green, Edward Blue and Gracie.
She didn’t want to attend high school in Carbondale, so Ferguson told her to come back the next year and she would teach her. “I was happy about that,” Gracie told Witt. She had five high school classmates at the Missouri Heights school.
When Gracie was 14, her mother’s stepmother died and left some property and a little money. “We bought a phonograph,” Gracie said. “I remember how thrilled I was. I had seldom heard music.”
Gracie eventually quit school and stayed on the ranch to help her folks. She milked cows, took them out in the morning and brought them back at night and milked them again. She loved horses, so her dad bought her a black horse named Dixie from a neighbor. Her mom then bought a horse, also named Dixie. One of Gracie’s jobs was to ride to the Quakenbush place to get the mail. “Sometimes we would ride to Carbondale,” which included one ride to town to observe a high school graduation and then riding back. “There were no cars on the road at night,” she stated in the book.
Her mom took cream to the cream station, which was in a house across from the old jail at Fourth and Main Street. At one point, the Cowen family bought a Surrey carriage with fringe on top. “Sometimes we went to town in it, and everyone liked watching us go by.”
Sherman died at the age of 58. Katherine couldn’t keep up payments on the ranch and lost it. They sold everything but Gracie’s horse, Dixie, and the cows to pay debts. Katherine sold the property she had inherited and bought 11 acres where the Cowen Center now stands next to the Days Inn and Comfort Inn & Suites.
They had apple trees, “a couple of sheep,” chickens and Dixie. They sold cream and eggs and bought an old Model A for $35. “I drove to Glenwood Springs once a week to sell the cream and eggs, and get groceries,” Gracie shared, adding, “I would go around to restaurants and get their scraps for our chickens.”
In the book, Gracie explained that the place in Carbondale didn’t have electricity or running water. She lived there for 53 years until she sold it in the early ‘90s to developers who built the Cowen Center.
Gracie told Witt, “There were fun parts (of life) and hard parts, but it’s been alright. I never married because my folks always needed me, and the right one never came along. If I could have two wishes, I’d wish that I could stand up straight again … and that I could ride ole Dixie again up on Missouri Heights.”