The Colorado River has been dammed and diverted so many times, by so many entities and people, that it may never truly flood again in the Grand Valley (at least not within humanity’s tenure… although you can never […]
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Category Archives: Local History
Local History Thursday: Glenn McFall Remembers the Rifle Gap Curtain
There’s some art that’s not meant to last forever. If you see it before it’s gone, it leaves a deep-rooted impression on your memory. Recent European transplants to New York, Bulgarian artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude set their sights on Rifle, Colorado as the next place to create a famous art installation, centered […]
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Local History Thursday: The Grand Junction Train Depot Fire – When Bombs Rained Over Grand Junction
On June 27, 1943, a freight train traveling west toward Grand Junction, Colorado developed a hot box (an overheated axle) when passing through a rail tunnel in De Beque Canyon. The train stopped in Palisade, where workers repacked the axle. A hot box was always dangerous, but in this case it was especially so, because […]
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Local History Thursday: The Grand Junction Women’s Club
Historic Grand Junction was full of different types of clubs and organizations working to make the area a better place to live. Ethel M. (Bear) Hotchkiss was a member of the Grand Junction Women’s Club in the mid 1900s, and she reflects on the club and its role in the community during her 1979 […]
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Local History Thursday: The Many Stories of Poet Luis López
Luis López is a born storyteller, and he has many entertaining stories that tell the tale of his colorful life. In his new interview with the Mesa County Oral History Project, you can hear stories of his time in Albuquerque as a boy, and of the Pachuco Spanish that he and his friends spoke. López […]
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Local History Thursday: The Death of the Area’s Last Grizzly Bear
Big Foot Mary was well known among ranchers and inhabitants of the Uncompahgre area for having, well, big feet (interestingly, the leader of the last wolf pack in the Bookcliffs and Roan Plateau was reportedly named Old Bigfoot, so maybe […]
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Local History Thursday: When Bear Cubs Lived In A Brothel And A Mortuary
Poaching leads to nothing good. The results can be unbearable. Take the trapper who stole two wild bear cubs from their mother on the Grand Mesa and sold the cubs to interested parties. John Duncan Hart, a longtime state and federal game warden in Mesa County, relates that the cubs went to a brothel on […]
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Local History Thursday: The Hanging Flume
Deep in the Dolores River Canyon, there lies a long-inactive wooden structure built off high hopes and steady dreams of gold. This engineering feat is called the Hanging Flume, and miles of its fragmented remains cling to the canyon wall above the Dolores River, an hour and half drive from Grand Junction, Colorado. The hanging […]
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New Additions to Local Digital Archive
If you haven’t checked out our Local Digital Archive lately, I highly recommend it, cause we’ve added a bunch of cool stuff! In addition to our many online exhibits including the popular Veterans Remember series, Studio Lounge performances and Mesa County Oral History Project, we have the following new collections: Art on the Corner (AOTC) […]
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Local History Thursday: John Cotton Dana, The Librarian Who Opened Book Collections To The Public
Imagine a public library where you cannot get into see the books. Ok, so that part is pretty easy, what with the Cornavirus and all. But this crisis with its curbside holds pickup does have historical precedent. Up until the early Twentieth century, and even after that in many places, patrons were not allowed to […]
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