By Dala Giffin
CPW member Lori Rapp deserves accolades for arranging a summer meeting for us in Estes Park on August 24, 2024. By necessity, she reduced the scale of our usual seasonal outing from a two overnight stay to a half-day visit since reasonably priced lodging was not available in Estes. Still, she packed the itinerary with distinctive speakers who provided a look at the area’s history, resources, communications and challenges.
Selecting from her inventory of 24,000 antique postcards, historian Bobbi Heisterkamp showed us resort town guest lodging in fashion more than a century ago. Estes Park Museum Director, Derek Fortini discussed cataloging and indexing museum inventory for a twenty-first century database available to the public. Journalist and CPW member, Kathleen Spring shared insights of her coverage of the Lyons Stone Canyon wildfire this summer. Re-enactment story-teller Teri Johnson regaled us with anecdotes of the lives of Estes Park’s formative persons, Flora and F.O Stanley.
The (nearly) lost art of post cards.
Stories inferred from a pretty postcard with handwriting squeezed on the back reveal volumes about time and place and personalities long after the card reached its intended destination. Bobbie Heisterkamp offered us a picture postcard view of early Estes Park when guest lodges proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Lodges and guest ranches declined after World War 2 when more people, more automobiles, more roads and more travelers demanded motels. Dazzled by neon signs enticing the amenities of road-side rooms, swimming pools and television, travelers lost the cozy sense of community fostered by the lodges.
Bobbie provided us with illustrated maps of Estes Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Grand Lake circa 1930. The maps depict 25 grand lodges plus a few obscure but noteworthy structures. Drawing from her considerable collection of 24,000 postcards, she chose 15 for her talk. We followed along on the maps.
All but one or two lodges within Rocky Mountain National Park have vanished. They met their fate by fire or were razed by a National Park Service dedicated to returning land to its natural state. The assembly hall of former Moraine Lodge escaped the wrecking ball and is now a natural history museum.
Of interest to me was an 18-square-foot, two-story cabin built of stone at 12,700 feet elevation on Longs Peak’s boulder field. Though it had no electricity or running water, the postcard attests to a cook stove, bread box, desk, end table, kerosene lantern, hand-cranked phonograph and Navajo rug within. Opened to hikers in 1937, the cabin shuttered in 1937 when the underlaying rock shifted and Agnes Vaille cabin came apart.
Most lodges had rustic themes and were constructed using twisted, bark-covered logs and posts. Stairways, furniture, porches, walls, roofs were roughhewn. Navajo rugs, trophy animal heads and pelts were common accessories. One woman in Bobbie’s early audiences took exception to the term “rustic.”
“It wasn’t rustic, it was natural,” Enda Mills Kiley refuted when Bobbie showed a postcard of Longs Peak Inn owned by Enos Mills. In a follow-up letter to Bobbie, Enda wrote: “Long’s Peak Inn was naturally beautiful because my father individually selected mountain weathered trees, not live ones, for their character. Then [he]designed and artistically placed them supervising all of the building.” She concluded: “Long’s Peak Inn combined first class accommodations with nature guides.”
The Mills were instrumental in forming Rocky Mountain National Park. “Go outdoors! Enos Mills admonished, “It bursts with entertainment, refreshment and surprise.”
Twenty-First Century Estes Park’s Museum
Introduced to us as a “Jack of all Trades,” Estes Park Museum Director Derek Fortini discussed his systematic classifying of artifacts, oral histories and newspapers into digital formats. He confined the collection to items and personalities within Estes Park. His database is available to the public.
One of 18 municipal-owned and operated museums in Colorado, Estes Park Museum originated consequent to the 1962 demolition of an 1876 homestead ranch in Rocky Mountain National Park. Citizens scrambled to gather artifacts from the ranch and created a foundation to ensure their preservation. Raising $25,000-$30,000 a year, Estes Park Museum Friends and Foundation, Inc. continues to provide auxiliary funding for the museum.
The museum evolves to keep up with new trends. To this end, flat and three-dimensional photographs of some 30,000 artifacts are being scanned into the database. Derek is pleased Bobbie Heisterkamp has bequeathed her post card collection to the museum in her will. Hers are the only available interior photos of early guest ranches.
The museum has 330 oral histories recorded since the 1960’s in its inventory. First-person accounts of historic events recorded on video provide future audiences with nuances not detected from written format. We viewed a 1979 clip of old-timer Charles Eaglebloom saying, “When I arrived, I had four pennies in my pocket.” It gave us a feel for the half-Native American man seeking his fortune early decades into the twentieth century.
Once Derek was granted copyright permission to digitize in full color the town’s historic newspapers, he created the closest authentic replicas of newspapers that can be obtained. This rare quality digitalization was valuable to a researcher who was examining the kind of ink and toner used in previous eras. He has completed digitizing all editions from 1920-2000 and works on a few more every year.
Kathleen Spring, Editor, Lyons Recorder
When CPW member Kathleen Spring took the helm of her local newspaper in 2020, she thought she’d be writing quotidian stories of Lyons, Colorado. Unexpectedly, her work became indispensable during the Stone Canyon Fire that started July 30, 2024.
From Main Street, residents could see flames approaching the north end of town. Roads closed. Evacuations were issued. Forty-five protection groups were staging their firetrucks and emergency vehicles one block south of Main Street.
This was the sixth mandatory or volunteer evacuation Kathleen had experienced in ten years. Her bags were packed, waiting at the door. Meanwhile, she saw a service she could provide her community.
Readers needed up-to-the-moment information specific to their neighborhoods that was not available on a single government web site or on major news outlets. Night and day they checked the on-line Lyons Recorder for concise, accurate and significant updates.
Throughout the night, Kathleen researched and fact-checked. She updated counts of acreage burned and percentages contained. She listed non-profit and government resources for people, pets and livestock. She included thank-you messages from officials. She offered cleanup tips specific to chemicals released by the fire or contained in fire retardants. She posted hardships local residents experienced.
Readers responded. They offered help. Two hours after a call-out to aid firefighters based in Lyons who were working 20-hour shifts, four pick-up loads of energy drinks, sunscreen, and fresh towels arrived along with offers for home showers.
“In Lyons they just stuck to it. That’s the small-town grit they always talk about,” said Kathleen.
Normally, Kathleen works a 40-hour week donating her journalistic skills to approximately 6,000 on-line readers. Scant donations cover her bills for the website, computer and virus protection. People want the information, but they just don’t want to pay for it. Still, she’s committed to the notion that small town newspapers become essential archival resources of benefit to future historians.
“If I let this go, Lyons history will disappear,” she said.
She has adjusted to life in high fire risk zones.
“At one point I thought, ‘I’m moving to the city. I can’t take this again. Then Superior burned down, 1,000 homes. There’s no safe place. We’ll have to live with it.”
Raconteur Teri Johnson
Framed by tall pine trees, the view northwest from the museum provided a fitting backdrop to hear the life of Flora Stanley as told by history storyteller Teri Johnson. Mrs. Freelan Oscar Stanley was vigorous in her dedication to early Estes Park civic concerns. Teri’s first-person portrayal of Flora absorbed me to the point I almost forgot I was not meeting Flora herself.
F.O. Stanley is widely remembered for steam-powered automobiles he invented and manufactured 1902-1924. These forerunners to internal combustion vehicles opened Estes Park to a broader vacationing public. The grand hotels we learned about from Bobbie Heisterkamp were long operational when the Stanleys arrived in 1903.
Born in the 1840’s in rural Maine, school teacher Flora met headmaster Freelan in the 1870’s. Laws forbade married women from teaching so Flora became business manager to her entrepreneur husband. After fire destroyed their warehouse in Newton MA, Freelan’s twin, Francis Edgar, offered them work in his photography business. They grew rich inventing a less expensive method of developing film.
They invested their wealth in trotting horses. Flora managed the horses, while Freelan’s interest turned to horseless carriages. Riding around in a locomobile was lots more fun than photography so they sold their lucrative photo business to George Eastman. Eastman offered stock as partial payment, but Francis insisted on cash. Three years later, while Freelan perfected the Stanley Steamer, stock in Eastman Kodak soared.
Always self-reliant, Flora learned to operate and repair the steam-powered automobile. She became active in social justice and civic causes. Suffrage, education, culture, poverty and widow’s legal rights to own their husband’s property were her interests.
Freelan became ill with tuberculosis when he was in his fifties. Doctors suggested he move to Denver for its thin, dry air cure. He arrived in Denver in 1903, six feet tall and weighing 118 pounds. They continued on to Estes Park.
Against prevailing wisdom, Freelan drove his Steamer automobile to Estes alone. Saying he didn’t want to spare a worker on what would be a failed venture, a garage in Lyons refused to allow an employee to accompany Freelan the final 16 miles along the rough mountain road.
Despite having to fetch water from North St. Vrain Creek by himself, Freelan arrived in Estes Park two hours after leaving Lyons. By contrast, Flora’s stagecoach took five hours to go the same distance.
Tending to his nutrition and “cornering the market on eggs,” Flora nursed Freelan back to health. In weeks he gained 30 pounds. So happy were they in Estes that for the rest of their lives they spent summers in Estes and winters in Newton.
By all accounts the Stanley’s were generous, civic-minded leaders. Flora was a near-concert level pianist, while Freelan crafted and played violins. A childless couple, they played with children and provided funds for higher education. Along with donating 54 acres for a park in Estes, they advocated for Rocky Mountain National Park. Freelan opened the Stanley Hotel in 1909. It featured tap water, sewer systems and lights powered by a hydro-electric plant on Fall River.
As Flora’s aging eyesight failed, Freelan gave her the same assiduous care she had given him for tuberculosis. She died in 1939, “half-way to heaven” in Estes Park at age 92. One year later, Freelan died in Newton, aged 91. They had been married 63 years.
Photos by Ann Lockhart
