Early Mesa County settler Peter Matteroli was the dentist who outlasted them all. Peter felt anything but a warm welcome when he first decided to start his business in Grand Junction in the early 1900’s.  He rented a room on the 3rd floor in the Grand Valley National Bank Building (now the Dalby Wendland and Co. […]

Adrienne Kaga has been a valued employee of Mesa County Libraries for many years. Our Fruita branch manager is an excellent research librarian. If you want a piece of information found, obscure or not, Adrienne can find it. She also speaks Spanish, German and fluent financial-ese, as her previous career as a principal in a […]

“The mission of Handy Chapel has been and continues to be a beacon of helping with the spiritual, social and economic needs of all our fellow man.” – Josephine Dickey Nestled on the corner of 2nd Street and Grand Avenue in Grand Junction, Colorado lies the Handy Chapel, an important structural piece of Mesa County’s […]

Let’s be clear: In the 1920’s, The Ku Klux Klan was a social and political power in Western Slope towns just as it was elsewhere in Colorado. White Protestants throughout the state joined because they were drawn by the Klan’s anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, anti-corruption message, and by the Klan’s hatred of African Americans. Yet some […]

Dudley Mitchell was an early Mesa County resident and an interviewee of the Mesa County Oral History Project.  In multiple interviews with Dudley, he discusses his fifty-year employment working an assortment of jobs for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad (D&RG). If you ever needed any information on how the railroad worked in the early […]