Denver Inside and Out

Inventing Cherry Creek: 150 Years of the Making of an Urban Environmental Landscape

109 S H E L L E N B A R G E R Modern Mountain Views the sheer weight of the decision-making process could bring even the most progressive urbanite to her knees. Moreover, new technologies and modern conveniences threatened traditional family life at a time when the home was invested with considerable moral authority. To the rising American middle class and women in particular, one’s home not only reflected but shaped the moral integrity of its occupants. Its beauty reflected their taste, its functionality their industriousness, and its inventiveness their progressiveness. In the Colorado mountains, summer-home owners took their modernity in doses both large and small. Some embraced the accoutrements of progress as rapidly as they became available. These summer residents, seeking a mountain getaway that was within striking distance of the most up-to-date industrially produced goods, hardly hesitated in transporting the trappings of modern society with them. Advancement and progress were not only anticipated but eagerly embraced, with little sense of hypocrisy or contradiction for their ultimate effects. F. O. Stanley is one such example. An early automobile pioneer, Freelan Oscar Stanley and his twin brother Francis Edgar (F. E.) Stanley owned a highly successful steam-powered automobile company in Newton, Massachusetts . In 1903, F. O. was diagnosed with tuberculosis and ordered by his doctor to Colorado for the mountain cure. Within days, F. O. and his wife, Flora, boarded a train to Colorado and made their way to Estes Park for the summer. F. O. and Flora soon acquired eight acres and built a grand 5,000-square-foot, Georgian-inspired summer home. Fronted by a 40-foot veranda, it boasted a grand stair, indoor plumbing, and call buttons for the maid. Cured of his tuberculosis, Stanley returned to this home every summer for thirty-six years. He threw himself into driving the development of Estes Park, building the largest and finest hotel, becoming its first bank president, and advocating for the establishment of Rocky Mountain National Park. His accomplishments were legion, and his legacy lives on today.4 Yet many summer-home owners deliberately turned their backs on the city, purposefully rejecting modern conveniences in their quest for a more rustic summer life. Most cabins and cottages along the Front Range were, in fact, functionally primitive, heated by a woodstove or fireplace and without electricity or running water. Structural stud walls were left uncovered inside, a stark reminder that such homes were intended for limited seasonal use and were not winterized. Although some homes had a single bathroom, outdoor pit privies prevailed. In 1914, Katherine Garetson of St. Louis filed a claim for a quarter-section of land in the Tahosa Valley, near present-day Allenspark. With the help of 110 D E N V E R I N S I D E & O U T a friend, Annie Adele (A. A.) Shreve, and the company (and occasional hindrance ) of a Great Dane named Gypsy, she built a summer cabin, christened “Big Owl” after the great horned owl that nested nearby. While her own cabin was being built that fall, Garetson stayed in a nearby rustic cabin owned by her sister Helen Dings. Her vivid recollections drive home the harsh reality of winter spent in a nonwinterized summer home. This summer house was heated by fireplace only…. When the log would burn low, about two in the morning, my poor short-haired Dane would come to my bed, shove her head under the covers; then shiver and shudder till my bed rocked. I was apt to be awake and very miserable myself, so I’d build a cracking, blazing fire and the two of us would crouch…between the andirons with a steamer rug wrapped around us....5 Garetson proved up her three-year residence claim and returned as a summer resident off and on for years, opening a tearoom to accommodate summer tourists. In many cases, a lack of domestic systems resulted from budget constraints . However, the correlation between budget and amenities is not nearly Katherine Garetson and Annie Adele Shreve at Big Owl, Garetson’s summer cabin. Courtesy Estes Park Museum. 111 S H E L L E N B A R G E R Modern Mountain Views so straightforward. Even the wealthiest summer-home owners often renounced comfort for a more rugged lifestyle. The prominent and affluent Evans-Elbert family embraced its own brand of rusticity on an...