On Highway 133, near Redstone, Colorado, a memorial plaque reads: This monument stands in tribute to the miners of Coal Basin, who confronted adversity and proved themselves resourceful, innovative and intrepid. We honor their achievements and their sacrifices, remembering in particular those brave, good men whose lives were lost in the mines … Placed with […]
History
Posted inNews
‘If only the walls could talk’ — The story of 202 Euclid
So mused Carbondale resident Lynn Siodmak when describing the house she and her partner Joel Rem had purchased at the corner of Euclid Avenue and 2nd Street last fall. As it turns out, the walls — and house — had a lot to say, thanks to her research and that by members of the Carbondale […]
Posted inEducation
Frank Sweet: The man behind the Sweet Jessup ditch
Editor’s note: Most of this article is taken from Edna Sweet’s 1947 book “Carbondale Pioneers, 1879-1890.” She based the book on interviews and her own memory. When Frank Sweet arrived in the Carbondale area from Connecticut in 1882, the dry ground was covered with nothing but sagebrush as far as his eye could see. He’d […]
Posted inColumns
CVEPA Views: Flow the Acequia Madre
I am just back from the Land of Enchantment and I am still under the spell. On my sojourn through northern New Mexico I wandered through the cacophony of tan hills and deep arroyos (gulches) filled with small villages and intimate neighborhoods. I ate my way from pueblo to pueblo, savoring food that is typical […]
Posted inColumns
Historiography: The Politics of Water
Turn on the tap, water pours out. We take it for granted. But our water was hard-fought in the early 20th century by some of the Roaring Fork Valley’s legendary champions of water rights. In the late 1880s, Glenwood Springs attorney Edward T. Taylor dealt mainly with cases involving land and water issues. Particularly concerned […]
Posted inBusiness
Crystal Valley Echo flips the page
Just up the Crystal Valley, in a cabin on Redstone Boulevard, Gentrye Houghton has kept busy behind the keyboard, often basqued in the blue light of her laptop late into the night to get The Crystal Valley Echo to print. While the winds of the Pacific have whispered in her ear that it’s time to […]
Posted inColumns
Historiography: The last picture show
“Carbondale History, 1887-1976,” by the Carbondale Study Club (1976): In the early days of the town, there was a motion picture theater on the north side of Main Street [351 Main, now The Pour House]. Every week there was a show … on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Admission was 10 cents for children and 15 or […]
Posted inColumns
CVEPA Views: Earth, water, fire and air!
Woe is us. Yes, the millions of people in the Great American West who depend on the snowpack for 80% of our water. This year has shaken us to the bone. Apparently, there was a warmer and drier year, winter 1980, that we are competing with. Oddly, more prominent in people’s memory was the terrible […]
Posted inNews
Thompson House gets some TLC
The Thompson House is of particular significance to Carbondale, being the only structure in town on the National Register of Historic Places and the home of the homesteading Thompson-Holland family, including Hattie Thompson, who passed away in the house in 1944. Setting foot inside is like stepping back in time, with many items of the […]
Posted inNews
Local time capsules preserve Valley histories
… Time, flowing like a river Time, beckoning me Who knows when We shall meet again, if ever But time keeps flowing Like a river to the sea … ‘Til it’s gone forever … Unless, of course, it’s properly preserved, to counter that line from the 1980 Alan Parsons Project song, “Time.” Indeed, time does […]