If you came down with a highly infectious disease in the late Nineteenth or early Twentieth century, you were likely to end up quarantined in Mesa County’s Pest House. The Pest House resided in the old Mesa County Hospital building, located just over the Colorado River from Grand Junction on the rise up to the […]

In the dusty heart of the desert near Grand Junction and the Colorado-Utah border lies a little town called Cisco, Utah (last I heard, population: 1).  Current Cisco dwellers are no strangers to isolation, but that hasn’t always been the case. According to long-time rancher William “Bill” Cunningham, one of the earliest settlers of the […]

Within the first few months of moving to Grand Junction, I went out for a cloudy day drive on Highway 141 up to Gateway, Colorado. This day trip had been recommended to me by many locals for its incredible beauty, and those recommendations were 100% accurate.  With sweeping canyon views, verdant sagebrush fields and plentiful […]

If you have ever taken the Durango Silverton or stopped in Silverton for a rest during a nail biting and beautiful drive on Highway 50, you may have come across the Grand Imperial Hotel, an old and intriguing building that thrives with tourist traffic. Is the Grand Imperial Hotel haunted? It might be, according to […]

Mesa County Libraries have plenty of resources to delight those interested in history, such as our Veterans Remember collection of interviews, the Mesa County Oral History Project collection, our online obituaries, and the Rashleigh Regional History Room in the Central Branch. But did you know that our history collection also contains linguistic knowledge that, due […]

“The Fair Store Floor Walker,” sounds like a creepy story about some ghost shuffling around an old abandoned building.  Sorry to disappointment any horror fans out there –  “floor walker” is actually a job title given to early Grand Junction resident Jennie Elizabeth Dixon. In the early to mid-1900s, a floor walker was a person […]

Sometime in the 1910’s, Indian Henry, a Ute raised by white settlers in the Paradox Valley, was shot and killed by his friend, the Finish immigrant and miner John Keski. The shooting took place in a boarding house in Bull Canyon that was owned by W.L. Cummings and run by Laura Foster (who had been […]