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For some, winter becomes a time to celebrate quiet solitude and reflection. For early Westwater Canyon homesteader, Veda Macbeth, solitude existed no matter the season. Veda was born in 1899 and spent the first decade of her childhood living in La Sal county, Utah. She moved to Mack, Colorado in 1919 where she began work […]
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As a former sheriff’s deputy and an African-American woman involved with community and educational efforts through Black Citizens and Friends, Janielle Westermire has a unique and very personal perspective on race relations, and on the Black Lives Matter protests that gripped the United States following the 2020 death of George Floyd. In her interview with […]
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Beginning tomorrow on First Friday, the Art Center of Western Colorado will host a new exhibit titled Alfred Nestler: The Power of the Pen: An Exhibition from The Art Center’s Permanent Collection. In honor of this showing, we explore the life of Nestler, an artist who got his start in Grand Junction before becoming part […]
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What is a three wire winter, you ask? For folks that live in snowy, persistently cold places like Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a three wire winter occurs when the snow reaches the third wire on a barbed wire fence. It is also the name of a wonderful little publication put out from 1976 to 1988 by […]
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In 1981, coinciding with Grand Junction’s centennial celebration, the Mesa County Oral History Project (MCOHP) produced forty-eight radio plays about local history. Over forty-eight weeks, these plays aired on radio stations KSTR, KREX-AM, KREX-FM, and KMSA, with the last play broadcasting on August 21, 1982. Now, the Radio History Theater plays have been digitized and […]
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Anyone who lives in Mesa county and loves the crisp autumn air and the bright yellow Aspen trees knows one of the best spots to get your fill of beauty is on the Grand Mesa. The Grand Mesa is the world’s largest flat-top mountain, located 40 miles east of Grand Junction, Colorado. Every year the […]
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Antonio Clark has already accomplished much as a young man. He was a standout football player for Thomas Jefferson High School in Denver. He also played cornerback for the Colorado Mesa University football team, and became the first person in his family to graduate from college. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment, though, came as a community […]
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Dr. Hannah Marie Wormington was a woman who studied and worked hard to stand out and have her voice heard in a profession full of men, and in the realm of discovery her hard work paid off. Hannah Marie was an anthropologist, a writer of published texts, an educator, an explorer, and an archaeologist. She […]
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I first heard about the supposed valley curse in 1990. A friend had gone away to college and come back before finishing. He said, “It must be the valley curse.” When I asked what that was, he explained that when the Utes were forcibly removed from the Grand Valley in 1881, they cursed the white […]
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Mesa County Libraries is home to an excellent trove of old, rare, local and southwest-based books compiled in our Rashleigh History Room. Within the depths of this room, I stumbled across a title sure to intrigue the palette of any fan of both cookbooks and history. Mesa County Cooking with History is a compilation of […]
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