Murder, bootlegging, cattle rustling – these are only a few of the intriguing topics that will be hit on at this year’s La Plata County Historic Driving Tour, which turns its sights west toward Hesperus.
For the past five years, the Historic Driving Tour has highlighted different parts of the county, bringing curious residents to Allison, Tiffany, the Old Fort Lewis campus and Hermosa, to name a few.
This year, the tour will start at 9 a.m. May 18 at the Hesperus Baptist Church, 22972 Colorado Highway 140.
Helen Ruth Aspaas, whose family moved to the Hesperus area in the early 1870s, said like most mining towns that bust, there aren’t many visual relics to remind people of Hesperus’ past. Instead, the past lives on through stories handed down through generations.
“There’s so much history here, but there’s not much to show for it,” Aspaas said. “But isn’t that true for any mining community?”
Duane Smith, a retired Fort Lewis College history professor, said Hesperus got its start as a coal mining town. At its height in the early 1900s, the town had as many as 800 to 900 residents, he said.
Just outside Hesperus proper, a community known as Parrot City almost became the county seat of La Plata County. The effort was thwarted, however, by residents in Durango who called for an election and out-voted those in Parrot City, which now no longer exists.
But as coal mining declined, so did available jobs, and more families started to move away.
“Hesperus had its moment in the limelight, you could say,” Smith said.
There’s certainly a legacy left behind.
John Peel, a former columnist for The Durango Herald, will tell one such story at a stop along the tour.
Peel wrote a two-part series for the Herald in the early 2010s about a Secret Service agent who in 1907 was gunned down in cold blood while investigating alleged illegal coal mining activities in Hesperus.
We won’t give you all the details here. You’ll have to go on the tour for that.
“He was the first special agent to be killed in the line of duty,” Peel said. “(President) Teddy Roosevelt was mad. It was a national story.”
Aspaas, who grew up in Hesperus, intends to tell the story of the hard life of Annie Puetz, who was twice widowed and had to support three children. She did this by bootlegging from her home in Hesperus, which still stands today and is a stop on the tour.
“She was apprehended and went to jail for a year in West Virginia,” Aspaas said. “But she came back.”
Andrew Gulliford, a history professor at FLC, said his talk will focus more on the silver and gold mining that occurred north of Hesperus in La Plata Canyon. One of his main topics: the life of Olga Little, who holds such stalwart stories as saving a group of male miners from a blizzard.
“She is really one of the most unique women in the American West, and we can claim her as a La Plata County resident,” he said.
But outside these eye-grabbing stories, Hesperus has remained over the years an agricultural community. That’s the Hesperus that Aspaas remembers fondly from childhood.
“It was not that much different than it is now,” she said of her childhood.
But these days, there is a change in the air as more people discover Hesperus, which offers a quiet place to live and a relatively short commute to Durango. And, it’s still affordable.
“I’m seeing more young families and professional couples,” she said. “They seem to be showing a stronger sense of wanting to be part of the community.”
jromeo@durangoherald.com
Driving Tour Poster 2019 (PDF)
Historic Driving Tour
The La Plata County Historic Driving Tour will be held May 18 in Hesperus.
A walking tour of Hesperus will take place from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Stops include:
Hesperus Baptist Church
The Hesperus Mine
Rio Grande Southern Railroad
Curtet House and Store
Annie Peutz’s Boarding House
St. Paul Catholic Church
Hesperus School
Lunch will be held from 12:30 to 2 p.m. at the Hesperus Baptist Church, 22972 Colorado Highway 140.
The tour will continue from 2 to 3 p.m. at May Day School/Olga Little Boarding House.
Lunch will be provided by the Marvel Grange. Cost is $8 per person. To order lunch, call Cindy Greer at 588-3386 by May 13.
Participants should not bring dogs, and car-pooling is encouraged.
