In Mills, Iowa in 1875, Isaac and Sarah Cooper welcomed their second daughter Alice into the world. Shortly afterward, the family came to Colorado, where Isaac engaged in mining operations. After traveling to Boulder, Golden and Leadville, the Coopers eventually ended up in Defiance, at the confluence of the Roaring Fork and Colorado Rivers. 

Isaac Cooper soon purchased the land that included the small townsite and began development of his grand vision of a hot springs resort destination. Sarah wasn’t thrilled with the original name, so she persuaded her husband to rename the town for her childhood home in Glenwood, Iowa. Thus, Glenwood Springs was born.

Ten miles south on the Roaring Fork River, another town was developing a mile east of the Crystal River. But Isaac Cooper thought the flat land at the confluence of those two rivers was a better location for a town, where a railroad station could serve as the junction between Glenwood Springs and Aspen. 

In 1885, Sarah Cooper filed for title on the land, and the town of Cooperton began to bloom. But in 1887, Isaac died before a deal could be cemented with the railroad men, and the town of Cooperton died with him. The train station was subsequently located in the eastern settlement, incorporated as Carbondale in 1888. Cooperton is still the official name of the Satank neighborhood in Garfield County records.

After her husband’s death, Sarah Cooper purchased land south of Cooperton. Her mother Mrs. Lucy Hall bought some of the adjacent land. There they built residences where Sarah and her daughters Charlotte and Alice lived during the summers, while spending winters at their Denver residence.

According to Edna D. Sweet in “Carbondale Pioneers 1879 to 1890”:

Alice Cooper was a talented sculptress … and made many pieces of rare beauty. One modeled from a cowboy on the Grubb Ranch riding a Bronco, a bust of her grandmother labeled, ‘Grandma Hall,’ and three little nymphs standing under an umbrella in the rain.

While attending high school in Denver, Alice Cooper won a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago. There she met railroad lawyer Nathaniel Hubbard. After his divorce from his first wife, Hubbard married Alice in 1895 and moved with her to Denver.

Just as she had done as a child, Alice and her family spent summers in the Roaring Fork Valley. Len Shoemaker writes in “Pioneers of the Roaring Fork:”

Hubbard set up a cattle ranch under the brand name, Bar Fork, on the original Cooper and Hall homesteads … he built the large barn, which, I believe, is the best and largest log building ever to be constructed in that valley … The barn was 100 by 100 feet square. It had a square 4-sided roof … 60 by 60 feet. A shed roofed outer building, 20 feet wide, entirely surrounded the inner room. The whole building was tied together by an intricate system of carefully matched corners, each accurately fitted.

The Roaring Fork Valley Journal, February 12, 1976 added:

The famous barn of Nathaniel Hubbard … was built using a system of trussing that Hubbard had observed during a period of duty with the US Army in Siam [now Thailand].

Though she was known as Mrs. Hubbard to her community, Alice used her maiden name professionally and continued to sculpt while raising three daughters. In 1904, she was commissioned by the Oregon State Historical Society to produce a sculpture for the Lewis and Clark Exposition to be held in Portland in 1905. Len Shoemaker describes the work in “Pioneers of the Roaring Fork:”

The statue was a representation of Sacajawea, the Shoshone Indian woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their western expedition in 1805-1806. It won her nationwide fame. The statue was a bronze figure of a buckskin-clad woman with a papoose on her back.

After the exposition, the statue was installed in a Portland park where it still resides. Cooper’s statue not only made her famous, but exposed the public to the story of Sacajawea, a little-known historical figure at that time. 

Alice Cooper died in 1937 and is buried alongside her parents in Denver. The fate of the Bar Fork ranch is detailed in “Memoirs of a River … Up the Crystal … Volume 2” by Charlotte Graham:

Satank resident Greg Forbes told me that the Bar Fork changed hands over time until Harold “Shorty” Papst [of Blue Ribbon beer] donated some 350 acres of the ranch to Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS) for their school grounds in the early 1950s.

CRMS is a college preparatory boarding school founded by John and Anne Holden. Though many more buildings have been added, the original buildings remain and Hubbard’s landmark square barn, the largest log barn in Colorado, contains offices, a library, and an auditorium. 

Just like in Alice and Nathaniel’s era, the Bar Fork property still has hay fields and cattle grazing land, currently leased by Nieslanik Beef for their herd’s winter pasture. But today CRMS is best known to the Carbondale community for its spring plant sale, with thousands of offerings planted and nurtured by the students, and the money going back into the garden, which provides much of the food for the school’s meals.

Author’s note: For those who remember the 1970s, the shock rock performer Alice Cooper (Vincent Damon Furnier) didn’t take his stage name from our local sculptor. According to Wikipedia, he wanted a name that sounded sweet and innocent to contrast his macabre image.