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253 Growth and Maturity: Estes Park in the 1920s Chapter 9  Growth and Maturity: Estes Park in the 1920s BETWEEN 1919—WHEN THE PANORAMIC PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN from Prospect Mountain—and 1926 the growth and development of Estes Park continued. Our understanding of how the village looked in that year rests on firm ground. Thanks to Sanborn fire insurance maps created from a survey completed in May and June 1926, we have a set of scaled drawings that provides us with an exact footprint of Estes Park, showing every hotel, residence , structure, and water line within the town limits and in much of the surrounding area as well.1 Of additional help to historians are two volumes of insurance records which supplement the Sanborn maps and use a similar base line.2 What these maps chiefly show is the extent to which, in a period of seven years, the village had built itself out to become a busy commercial center dedicated to tourism. Dominating an increasingly congested Elkhorn Avenue were liveries, hotels, and garages, including the sprawling warren of interconnected structures that housed the freight and passenger operations of Roe Emery’s Rocky Mountain Parks Transportation Company. In 1919 vacant lots and private residences were still found along Elkhorn Avenue. By 1926, the vacant lots were almost totally occupied with most of those remaining being used for miniature golf courses (there were three on Elkhorn 253 254 Growth and Maturity: Estes Park in the 1920s by 1930) and other tourist amusements. Along upper Elkhorn from the Fall River Bridge to the Estes Park Bank only one private residence remained, the Homer James house, while in the block to the east, the number had been reduced to about four, including the homes occupied by the Service and Macdonald families. Much the same was true along Moraine Avenue, where the sturdy log home built in 1908 by banker Sidney Sherman had already been razed to make way for a local telephone exchange.3 Among the newer businesses on lower Elkhorn was Frank Rollins’s garage and campground, a visible reminder of the way in which the automobile had now become a central part of the tourist experience. Located just east of the village park on the site of what is now the Municipal Building, these popular facilities had been originally opened by Oscar Peter (O. P.) Low in 1921 on land owned by F. O. Stanley. Rollins had taken over Low’s operations in fall 1924 under a five-year lease that included free fuel and oil for Stanley’s automobile. Rollins renovated and enlarged the business by installing a playground, fireplaces and picnic tables, and a new comfort station with hot and cold running water. He also painted the surrounding fences to match the colonial yellow, white, and red of Stanley’s nearby hotel. By 1927 the Rollins campground, staffed with uniformed attendants, was being hailed as “one of the best equipped of such in the West.”4 Across the street in the village park two new buildings, a library and town hall, had joined the post office, making the park—which for some years also contained a bandstand—seem rather un-park-like. The Estes Park Public Library, a neat stucco, wood, and stone structure, was designed to blend architecturally with the adjacent post office and school building. It had been built by the Estes Park Woman’s Club in spring and summer 1922 at a cost of about $5,000, much of the actual construction done by village men who hauled in thirty loads of stone, logs, and sand.5 Two years later, in fall 1924, the town hall was completed, a project under active discussion since at least 1919 when the town fathers briefly considered purchasing the movie theater on Moraine Avenue and converting it to civic purposes.6 The new building, constructed of moss-covered granite and roofed with slate tile shingles, was sited back-to-back with the post office, its entrance facing west toward Virginia Drive. In addition to a meeting room for the village trustees, the town hall contained a jail cell “for scoffers of the law” and a garage large enough to house both a drying rack for a fire hose and the town’s new White Motor fire truck (purchased the year before at a cost of $5,640, more than half raised by subscription). The town hall was soon serving other needs. By the following summer the Chamber of Commerce had...

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