Over one hundred years ago, Margaret Gessing, a model for the Daniels and Fisher department store, was widely known as Denver’s most beautiful model. She not only modeled for individual customers and in fashion shows, but also was in high demand by newspaper photographers for fashion-page articles. After Margaret married a well-known and colorful mortician, Joseph E. Bona, they had a reputation for hosting great parties. Her story involves a number of notable, historic buildings of Denver's past.
The National Register of Historic Places and Colorado State Register of Historic Properties is one tool that recognizes National Hispanic Heritage Month, celebrated from mid-September to mid-October.
On a lonely stretch of highway about 100 miles north of Denver, there’s a sign for a town where no town exists: Virginia Dale, Colorado. There’s a boarded-up post office, a tiny community church, and a Colorado historical site marker that may or may not catch your eye as you drive by on US Highway 287 at seventy-five miles an hour.
One of the many advantages of living in Colorado is the easy access to Rocky Mountain National Park and its eastern “gateway” town, Estes Park. While Estes Park’s proximity to the National Park is certainly a major draw, there are many sights worth seeing in the downtown area, especially if you’re interested in a bit of history.
Sitting deep in southern Colorado, the former mining town of Starkville—like so many other mining communities—has seen its share of booms and busts. Although the town is far smaller than it was during its once-lively and industrious mining period, the people of Starkville see their past as something worth preserving. They recently formed a CLG—a Certified Local Government—to help them preserve the town’s remaining historic buildings.
Imagine that your grandfather was a San Francisco ferryboat captain who transported the notorious gangster Al Capone to Alcatraz Island, and that, as a memento of the occasion, he quietly pocketed the key to Capone’s handcuffs. Now imagine that this small key—this tiny piece of history—stayed in your family for a few generations, until one day you got the idea that perhaps it should be rescued from your sock drawer and sent to a museum somewhere. But where should it go? Is there a museum for keys?
What better way to celebrate National Great Outdoors Month than to explore some of Rocky Mountain National Park’s National Register-listed trails? Many of the Park’s buildings, resources, and trails are historic.
Travel was integral to Estes Park photographer Fred Payne Clatworthy’s life and work. During the early 20th century, transit companies sponsored Clatworthy’s travel to locations near and far. Railroads like the Great Northern and Southern Pacific sent Clatworthy to shoot promotional images in Glacier National Park and the western coast of Mexico in the 1920s, while later in the decade Clatworthy ventured further afield when the Matson Navigation and Union Steamship Companies sent him to Hawaii, New Zealand and Tahiti. Many of these trips yielded his most well-known images: full color autochromes that appeared in National Geographic magazine between 1923 and 1934.