Tag: history
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Julia A. Holmes: Abolitionist, suffragette and the first Anglo woman to climb Pikes Peak
By Steve Plutt, Special to the Tribune The life of Julia Holmes was dynamic, full of adventures and daring escapades. And she never backed down from anything, especially when it meant fighting for justice. Her commitment to the Underground Railroad and her staunch support for women’s suffrage were issues she believed were worth standing up…
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Who are those folks immortalized by all the city’s statues? Meet the cowboys, philanthropists, builders, miners and the ‘Pumpkin Man’
Perhaps as you’ve walked downtown or stopped at a red light while you were driving you’ve had that moment to wonder exactly who was that person memorialized with a statue in a median, outside a building, in a park or sculpted just gazing west toward Pikes Peak. What did they do? The people in the…
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The Divide Schoolhouse
By Steve Plutt, Special to the Courier In celebration of Colorado’s 150th birthday and the United States’ 250th, local historian Steve Plutt and the Ute Pass Historical Society have written a series of stories to bring the area’s colorful history to life. Anyone who has traveled through the town of Divide has probably noticed the…
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Camp Wa-Na-Ka gave girls a ‘Sunny’ disposition
By Steve Plutt, Special to the Courier In celebration of Colorado’s 150th birthday and the United States’ 250th, local historian Steve Plutt and the Ute Pass Historical Society have written a series of stories to bring the area’s colorful history to life. Camp Wa-Na-Ka was a girls camp just 2 ½ miles north of downtown…
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Ice cream is the way to the good life | Paul Batura
If the health of a city could be measured by the availability and variety of its ice cream, then Colorado Springs is thriving like few other locales. The opening last week of Josh & John’s first drive-thru shop at 870 West Garden of the Gods Road adds yet another option for enthusiasts of the frozen…
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Taking a big-picture view of the war in Iran | Mike Rosen
“Partisanship should end at the waters’ edge.” That was a slogan coined in 1947 by Senator Arthur Vandenberg a Michigan Republican. By the “water” he meant the seas that enclose our nation. Vandenberg had been a staunch isolationist before World War II but after the allied victory he came to believe that domestic political fights should be put aside when the nation deals with foreign policy and major international threats. Obviously, that hasn’t come to pass. There’s little doubt that congressional Democrats who’ve attacked Trump’s every move in this Iran war would be praising a Democrat president who had the foresight and courage to do…
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The storied history of the Teller County Courthouse
By Steve Plutt In celebration of Colorado’s 150th birthday and the United States’ 250th, local historian Steve Plutt and the Ute Pass Historical Society have written a series of stories to bring the area’s colorful history to life. A few years after Bob Womack’s gold discovery, friction and high tensions developed between wealthy mine owners…
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El Paso County Poor Farm, one of the last in the country, cared for the needy, old or ill
Since 2017 the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum has told the area’s history with an interactive alphabetical “Story of Us.” “P” stood for the Poor Farm in the exhibit. Fittingly, the Poor Farm had been here since the beginning of the city. In 1880 the county commissioners chose a cottage on El Paso Street for a…
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How the City Above the Clouds became a city
By Steve Plutt Most of us are familiar with Woodland Park’s moniker as “the city above the clouds,” but at what point did it transform from the town of Woodland Park to the City of Woodland Park? It all started in the early 1970s, when its population began to surge significantly. As that growth continued,…
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The Antlers’ 143-year history: 3 incarnations and ghost stories, too
Since 1883 every photo or painting of downtown Colorado Springs seems to focus west along Pikes Peak Avenue to include the mountains. And that view has had one other feature, the Antlers Hotel. And what a history it has had. More than 12 years earlier, Gen. William Jackson Palmer had been pulling together plans for…