History 2710
Service Learning Project Report
Professor Earl Mulderink
April 15, 2002
These Pictures
are of my Great Grandparents Hunting which the town was first founded on
When it came time to do the Service Learning Project this
time around I thought for sure that I would be ready to do it and would not have
any problems getting it done on time. Well it guess I got it done on time, but
as for it being easy, I was truly wrong about that. This was the best thing
that I have ever done in a community as a research project. I learned a lot
about where I came from and where the town is going next. It was really of fun
taking pictures and talking to the people about what this little town was like
when it was built. I found out that Dolores County and its surrounding areas
were a lot better off then than it is now. It was founded as a post office
situated 65 miles west of Rico, Colorado. It was the nearest railroad and
banking point for the next 100 miles. Population 702 estimated 1957 population
was supposed to go to over 1500 people by the next year with the in flow of
people in to the town. Altitude of 6843 in 1947 it was the perfect town in
which it had everything form an Opera house to the nicest house of their time.
One of the buildings that I researched was the high school where in I had attended for art class and English class. All the students that go to school in Dolores County call it the Rock building; because it is made out of pure rocks, which came from supplies, give
The
creative learning center was formal the high school for the entire town. This
building was built during the Great Depression in which no money from the town
was made by using only the founders of people in the community.
during on of the worst times in history. It was built during the Great Depression as a school from kindergarten to senior level students. In the 1950s, it was remodeled after the new school was built that is now condemned was built. Now this former high school is the creative learning center on the school’s campus. It is now home to two English rooms, one art room and a woodshop. In its prime, the building was one gym and eight classrooms. The classes were divided between kindergarten and first grade, in which two class levels were taught at the same time. This allowed the high school level children to receive the best possible education. As well, it should be said that this building was made from the materials that were furnished by the community and the labor as well.
This
is what remains of the three Nielson homesteads. This was the cabin of my Great
Grandfather. This cabin is now destroyed, but remains one monuments of the
community.
The second great thing that I researched three of the cabins that my Great Grandfather used on the Dolores River. These pictures are from the cabin that he and his three brothers had built in the early 1900’s near the river at its lowest point. They would use the river for water in the winter, but they were forced to use water spring in the summer and. These cabins were destroyed after
This
is what happens when treasures are not protected by the community. This cabin
is of my Great Great Uncle Eric that was burned from the inside by a bunch of
kids with matches.
My Great Grandfather sold his land to the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) in the summer of 1923 after he purchased a future million dollar company that he called Nielson’s Construction Company. This purchase of the land allowed for the rest of the community to use this water outlet for recreation and water supply now.
After selling the land, my Great Grandfather was aloud to keep cattle on the river to raise cattle. My Grandfather told me that he had to ride every morning over the top of the dam to go to school into Dolores. He said that every one of his brothers had to do this except for the only sister, Aunt Ruth, because her mother would take her in the buggy each morning.
This great building to research for anyone has a
good time with history, because from what I was told by the local historian that
this is where the miners of the town went for a good time. The Opera house was
a former whorehouse in the early 1920.
The Opera House is one of the coolest places that I have ever heard of in the little town of Dove Creek. This was a former whorehouse for the miners of the community. It was later used as a place of entertainment for the local people of the town. It had everything from plays to movies. The Dolores County historical society also said that this was a place that Zane Grey enjoyed visiting while he was in town for the summertime.
The old laundry mat was the
most important place in town during the mine
rush in Colorado in which 30% of the women where employed here.
The laundry mat was also an interesting place to visit since the boom and bust times of the town. It was put in for the miners who did not have wives so that they could pay someone to do their laundry. Their entire close were washed by hand. The laundry mat is a lot different than it was back then, because there were no washing machines, and only the women that were paid to take care of it. The washboards and buckles still sit in the same place that they sat sixty years ago. The Dermo Mining Company paid the women. The women were usually one of the miners; wives and she took care of the cooking in the mining camp when the men returned from the mines for a weekend.
This next building was very important to me
because well it was my playhouse when I was growing up. It was the Doyel
Homestead back in 1920s. When this was founded, it already, sat there from a
mining outfit that was here before the town was 
This
is the oldest know building in the Dolores County area. It is the old Doyel
Homestead.
officially established. It now rests out on Highway 160 heading into Egnar, Colorado. This building’s date unsure at this time. Raymond Doyle, a man who grew up in the old homestead thought it was nice that there was someone trying to find out what the town was truly like during this time.
When I was looking through the history book of my family’s private collection I
found The Historical Encyclopedia of Colorado that also
bared my Great Great Grandfather Cyrel Clyde Wilson’s name in
it.
This is my Grandfather Wilson’s Homestead barn.
He was considered the leading farmer of Dolores County in the early 1930s. His property stretched over seven square miles north of Dove Creek. The principal crops produced on the land were beans and wheat, which are still the two major crops raised in the area today. The land in which is still farmed today by my dad was originally Bill Barrett’s homestead. He bought eighty acres of the land in 1943 after returning home from WWII. Cyrel Clyde Wilson, Jr., a native of Missouri, also operated the Wilson Wheat Farms in Utah as well as help Wilson Senior, his father to operate the farm. The list of this goes down as far as my brothers and me in the history books. The one major thing that surprised me that all the way back to my Great Great Grandfather was a conservative of the Elk in the area.
This
is the welcome center for Dolores County, but when it was first built, it was
used for a press office in the town.
This is one of the oldest buildings that are still used in the town. It is now the
Welcome Center for the town. When the town was first founded, it was the press office for the local Dove Creek Press, which still is running at a different location today. This building is made out of what most people consider old barn wood that came off the mountains in Durango, Colorado.
This
was the first public building in the community. It is now the Dolores County
School District, but in its own time, it was the first post office in the
county.
This building is the founding public building in the town of Dove Creek. It is now home to the Dolores County School District, but when the town was first founded, it was the place to send a letter and also to arrange to get a ticket to the railroads. This was the old post office. I have been in this building probably 100 time, but I never know that this was the original post office.
This picture taken in 1925 shows the harsh weather in the days of old shows a
cold February day in which the snow fall was so fast and heavy that it cause a
pour down of over 5 feet in snow in two days time.
I not only looked at the buildings of the town during earlier years, but also looked at the road systems of the town. This picture shows the local Texaco man trying to get through the snow in late February. The photograph was taken between Dove Creek and Cortez, Colorado, in 1925. . When I was talking with my grandfather about the roads during this time, he said that the roads were not paved until the last 1950s. When I asked him how were the roads coming out of the bottom of Slick Rock, Colorado, he said it was like trying to climb a hill with out using your hands to help you.
This is longest standing agricultural 
building in Dolores County today. Although it is just an old Well house, it is
still important to the community and to the people that own it now.
This well house is the oldest agricultural building known to the Dolores County Community. This barn once housed many different kinds of animals when first built. This well condemned now for use, but it still stands as a token of history for the community. In earlier times, it would have been used to get water from the underground well. This would produce enough water each year to water 100 head of cattle. Although this well is inactive, the well itself has been redrilled and this well has still not run dry.
This next
building is truly part of the boom and bust town phenomenon because this was the
only store in Engar, Colorado.
This was the first store in Engar, Colorado. It got most of its customers from the miners in the outside community.
Now here was the best entire site that I visited in my little community, because I did not know what this building
site of the
other was, but I always wonder about. It was the theater in the community. The
reason that it surprised me was that now in this time and day we do not
The
old theater house was a big part of the town when it was built it was used from
everything from movies to plays from the local acting society.
have a movie theater and plays theater in the town. This building could not do both at the same time, but was important either way it was used. It was not continued to be used, because a women purchased this building and decided to not use the building as a theater any more, but instead used it as a private home. Without proper care, this building became dilapidated and now is not of any use to anyone.
Well this was a little bite of what I did for my Service Learning Project; I hope that it was a good topic for what you were asking for. I enjoyed doing this project and to any one that tries to do a project like mine do tell them to limit their number of buildings to about three of them, because there were so many different things that I would like to know about these building that I would like to share with the community, but just ran out of time before I could finish a detail written findings on these historical treasures.