On certain quiet evenings, late into the night, it is said that you can hear an eerie whistle noise on the old narrow-gauge railway tracks between Grand Junction and Gunnison. The track begins to rumble, the air turns a sickly color that fills you with dread as the whistle squeals louder and louder until it […]
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Local History Thursday: Splitting the Atom, Project Rulison and Project Rio Blanco
When you take a core of enriched uranium-235 and start flinging neutrons at it, something very special happens. First, the neutron strikes the nucleus of a single atom of uranium-235, causing it to split into fragments. Then, these fragmented atoms release neutrons of their own, which strike the nucleus of neighboring atoms, causing a cascading […]
Continue readingLocal History Thursday: Peaches and Pioneers, an Early History of the Palisade Peach
It’s August, which can only mean one thing on the Western Slope; it is now peach season! If you’ve spent any time around the Grand Valley during late summer, you’ll know that we can get a bit crazy over our peaches. Everywhere you look, it’s peach cobbler, peach jam, peach wine, peach ice cream, or […]
Continue readingLocal History Thursday: Betty the Monkey’s Escape from Grand Junction’s Lincoln Park Zoo
Sometime in the late 1930’s or early 1940’s, a monkey named Betty escaped from the Lincoln Park Zoo. The Lincoln Park Zoo was a small zoo that was located in Grand Junction’s Lincoln Park in the early and mid-Twentieth century. According to William “Bill” Ela, who grew up to become a Mesa County District […]
Continue readingLocal History Thursday: Butch Cassidy’s Ride to Hell
It goes without saying, but Butch Cassidy was a real fascinating character. Despite being one of the Old West’s most notorious outlaws, he’s almost talked about as a sort of folk hero. Unlike many other outlaws and gangsters of American past, like Jesse James and Al Capone, Butch Cassidy is firmly established within an almost […]
Continue readingLocal History Thursday: …The Harder the Bust (Black Sunday, part 2)
On Wednesday, April 26, in a boardroom located in a Sixth Avenue skyscraper in Manhattan, a group of Exxon executives decided to kill the Colony Shale Oil Project. They considered a variety of factors, including the rising cost of the project, an unfavorable petroleum market, and declining first-quarter profits. They made their decision, shook hands, […]
Continue readingLocal History Thursday: An Interview with Dave Davis, the Artist Behind Art on the Corner
An oral history interview with local arts pioneer Dave Davis can now be found online in the Mesa County Oral History Project (a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and the Museums of Western Colorado). Many Grand Valley residents know the name of Dave Davis in association with Grand Junction’s Art on the Corner, a longstanding […]
Continue readingLocal History Thursday: The Bigger the Boom… (Black Sunday, part 1)
Forty-one years ago, on May 2, 1982, the news dropped like a bomb on the Western Slope; Exxon was pulling the plug on its $5 billion investment in the Colony Oil Shale Project, effective immediately. Overnight, $85 million in annual payroll disappeared as 2,100 workers were laid off from the project. The resulting upheaval was […]
Continue readingLocal History Thursday: Blood on the Mountain, a Deadly Shale Mining Incident
Here on the Western Slope, we have a long and troubled history with oil shale. Despite its tremendous abundance, the oil shale industry has never really lived up to its many promises to transform Western Colorado into a domestic energy juggernaut, and in the past these broken promises have cost us dearly. The economic, environmental, […]
Continue readingeResource Spotlight: Colorado Historic Newspapers
Here at Mesa County Libraries, we’re very passionate about our local history, and we love to help make researching it more accessible for everyone. If there’s one eResource we love that helps open a window into the past, it would definitely be Colorado Historic Newspapers! The Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC) is a free archive […]
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