History Colorado

Trinidad, Sopris and Starkville streetcar on the Trinidad Electric Railroad in Las Animas County, Colorado 🚎 Streetcars lost popularity rapidly in the 1920s due to heavy competition from personal automobiles.
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Taken by Otis Aultman in 1904-1915. History Colorado 93.322.1645

It’s the Autumn Equinox today, and the crisp air is already turning some leaves from green to yellow, orange, and red—soon to look a lot like the trees in this painting. The artist, Elisabeth Spalding, grew up in Denver, and was a founding member of the the Artists Club of Denver that would eventually become the Denver Art Museum, and of Denver’s first all-women artist group, the Le Brun Club.

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Image: Autumn landscape, painted in the 1900s by notable Colorado artist Elisabeth Spalding. History Colorado, PM.80.26.14

Captain Gail Harris’s remarkable journey from Newark, New Jersey to Durango, Colorado is filled with firsts and stops around the world. After serving as the first woman intelligence officer in an aviation squadron in 1973, she became the first Black woman instructor at the Armed Forces Air Intelligence Training Center of Lowry Air Force Base.

A few years later, she became both the first Black person and the first woman to lead the intelligence department for Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron in Rota, Spain. Capt. Harris was an intelligence leader during the Cold War and Desert Storm, in Kosovo, and at the 1988 Olympics in South Korea, and was the highest-ranking Black woman in the US Navy upon her retirement in 2001.

A Renaissance woman, she now spends her time studying music at Julliard, composing original pieces, hosting an R&B radio show, and she’s written a book about her trailblazing military career. Listen to her fascinating story in full here, a new addition to History Colorado’s oral histories collection: https://h-co.org/Captain_Gail_Harris

📜 Did you know? The Colorado Constitution was written in three languages: English, Spanish, and German. This was largely due to the efforts of Casimiro Barela, a territorial legislator who was born in then-Mexico on March 4th, 1847.

Barela began his political career at just twenty two when he was elected Justice of the Peace in Trinidad. In 1875 Barela helped write Colorado’s State Constitution. He fought to makesure that the constitution was published in English, Spanish, and German so that it would be accessible to more people across the state.
After being in the Colorado State Senate for almost forty years, Barela earned the nickname the “Father of the Colorado Senate.”

Learn more in "38th Star: Colorado Becomes the Centennial State," an exhibition now on view at the History Colorado Center. Delve into Colorado's origins through the authentic photographs, documents, artifacts, and voices that formed our state.

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Casimiro Barela sitting down in an office ,1905-1915, History Colorado 84.193.302

The Denver Broncos' first home game will take place this Sunday, September 20 against the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Empower Field attendees will have a chance to tackle the new “Beast in a Blanket”. The Broncos have high expectations this season after a stellar performance earned them the top seed in the AFC West last go around.

If you’ve got any lucky football or other sports memorabilia, Chance Ward, NAGPRA Collections Specialist and baseball enthusiast, will help you preserve them for any gameday rituals with tips on materials to use and avoid, and how to properly store different types of items such as baseball cards, trophies, and jerseys at a virtual How-To on October 6. You can register here: https://h-co.org/caring-for-sports-memorabilia

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Image 1: Broncos Game in circa 1966 between the Denver Broncos and the then Oakland Raiders. The photo shows Dan LaRose and other Broncos players attempting to tackle a Raiders player. History Colorado 89.416.1
Images 2 & 3: The reverse side of a wallet-sized season ticket pass (left) and accompanying Mile High Stadium seating chart from the 1976 Denver Broncos season, complete with handwritten notations of final game scores. History Colorado

Mirasol chiles have been grown in the Pueblo area for more than a century and have long been a cornerstone of the local culinary experience. As far as chile farmer, Dr. Mike Bartolo, can trace back, largely through family and other oral histories, the Mirasol started being grown in Pueblo County in the early 1900s. But prior to that, the history of the Mirasol is uncertain, dotted with hints and possibilities.

In 2003, Bartolo provided DNA samples of local Mirasol chiles to researchers at New Mexico State University (NMSU), led by Paul Bosland. They found the closest genetic match was a variety from Oaxaca. How the variety leaped from Oaxaca to Pueblo County is a matter of some speculation, and Bartolo emphasized the “gaping holes” in different theories.

One possible avenue is through a legendary figure in New Mexican chile lore.

Fabián García joined the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in Las Cruces (now New Mexico State University) in 1906 as a professor of horticulture, later becoming the first director of the college's agricultural experiment station. García spent decades working to improve and standardize the local chile pepper, releasing many varieties in his decades there. Among them was the predecessor to the modern Hatch chile pepper, which García called New Mexico #9.

Bartolo has seen century-old listings in the Burrell Seed Growers catalog, a Rocky Ford institution that still sells seed, for a plant called the “New Mexico Chile Improved.” He suspects that could be an early name ascribed to the Mirasol chile. He also has noted what appear to be chile pepper plants on the cover of a 1908 publication by García entitled Chile Culture with peppers growing upward—a telltale feature of the Mirasol. Bosland, who oversees the chile breeding and genetics research at NMSU, dismissed this as an “optical illusion.”

“The fruits are actually pendant. Someone moved the fruits to the upright position,” he commented.

Bosland is unable to verify or refute the presence of Mirasol chiles in García's research. However, the fact that Pueblo's Mirasol varieties are more closely related to the Oaxacan chiles than to those varieties known to have come out of NMSU's breeding program suggests that the Pueblo stock might not have originated with García.

Read more from The Colorado Magazine at: https://h-co.org/pueblo-chile-roots

When Fort Garland was decommissioned in 1883 the remaining troops were moved to Fort Lewis. The fort and its land reverted to local landowners, and the property fell into disuse. It passed through several hands until the 1920s, when the last owner announced plans to raze the remaining buildings.

Locals in San Luis Valley formed an association to purchase and preserve the fort. In 1945, the site was acquired by the Colorado Historical Society, now History Colorado. By that time all but five of the original twenty-two buildings had either been demolished or deteriorated. The remaining buildings were restored and the newly refurbished site opened as Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center in 1950
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History Colorado PH.PROP.3828

🪥 Studio portrat of Dr. Franklin Reed, a dentist from Trinidad, Colorado. Taken in 1890-1910 by Oliver Aultman. History Colorado 93.322.517