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Residents of the American West are no strangers to the idea of flash floods, but having one actually crash down on you while you’re camped in a canyon is different altogether. On August 28, 1939, cowhand Merle Winters was camped in the Utah Bookcliffs in a canyon of Diamond Creek. Winters was working for the […]
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People in the Grand Valley know Chet Enstrom for his delicious almond toffee, still sold by Enstrom Candies. But did you know that he started his career as an ice cream maker? In his interview with the Mesa County Oral History Project, Enstrom describes how he became involved in the ice cream business. When Enstrom […]
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Longtime Mesa County resident Evelyn Kyle turned 100 years old this year, and was honored by the Museums of Western Colorado with the Museum Service Award for her contributions to local history. Now, the Mesa County Oral History Project has recorded a new interview with Evelyn, in which she discusses her life and accomplishments. In […]
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The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG) gave Grand Junction its first permanent transportation link to the outside world with the completion, in November 1882, of a railroad bridge over the Colorado River at the confluence. The first train arrived at seven minutes of five o’clock on November 21, 1882, coming over the bridge with […]
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In the old days of rural schoolhouse education in Mesa County and the Western Slope, most kids simply withstood the smacked wrists and hits they received from teachers, and understood it was the price for bad behavior. Farm and ranch kids, the boys especially, were thought to be wild by nature, and they often simply […]
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What didn’t Al Look do? In his life, the longtime Grand Junction resident homesteaded near Dove Creek, Colorado, worked as an advertising manager for Durango and Grand Junction newspapers, wrote a popular column for The Daily Sentinel, became a knowledgeable amateur archaeologist, geologist and paleontologist who was involved with important dinosaur and Paleo-Indian digs in […]
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Mesa County residents can now find an oral history interview of U.S. Representative Wayne Aspinall online in the Mesa County Libraries catalog, via the Mesa County Oral History Project. In his time, Wayne Aspinall was one of the most powerful men in the United States. As one of the longest serving members of the U.S. […]
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Every town has its firsts: the first baby born, the first death, the first editorial shaming of a woman for riding her horse through town in inappropriate dress (see news clipping). The firsts of many towns and cities are mired in the haze of pre-history, when no one thought to make a note about the […]
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Join us for our next Kiva Bookclub, at 6:30 pm on Thursday, July 21st, in the Central Library Community Room, as we discuss Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger. In Ordinary Grace, thirteen-year-old Frank Drum, a Methodist preacher’s son, explores the darker side of what the book jacket describes as a “time of innocence and […]
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Clifton was an interesting place when I was a kid. In the late 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s, my neighborhood around 32 1/8th Road and others in the area had many abandoned houses with overgrown weeds, broken fences, and other features that might capture a child’s imagination. Who left that gate open? What’s inside the […]
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