The Prowers County Welfare Housing is important for its association with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislative agenda to rescue the United States from the Great Depression. 

The 1929 courthouse served as the center of county political and governmental activity.  Denver architect Robert K. Fuller designed the elegant Neo-classical building constructed of Indiana limestone.

In the early 1890s, the John L. Petticrew family settled in southern Prowers County and operated a stage stop between Lamar and Springfield.  The house, barn and associated rock walls are good, intact examples of sandstone construction utilizing locally quarried stone as designed and executed by the property owner. 

The property has been associated with agriculture in the Lamar area since Claus Paulsen established the farm in 1901.  Between 1910 and 1915, Paulsen represented the Payne Investment Company of Omaha, Nebraska, and in this capacity escorted would-be homesteaders from the Midwest to new homes in southeast Colorado. 

Built in 1936, the building is an especially pleasing example illustrating the Spanish Colonial / Mediterranean influence on Neoclassicism.  Pueblo architect Walter DeMordaunt designed the building. 

The Davies Hotel is typical of the numerous small town hotels whose location near the railroad depot provided them with a steady stream of lodgers.

Constructed in 1917, the two-level red brick building remains a good local example of a rural school district’s commitment to provide the space required to offer its students a broader educational program than found in the one-room building it replaced. 

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad built the brick second-generation depot in 1912. The Mission Revival style building was a combination-type depot, handling both passengers and freight.

The 1879 Holly SS Ranch Barn was part of the earliest period of settlement and development of Prowers County by farmers and ranchers.  The SS Ranch with one of the earliest and largest cattle ranches in the region.  Hiram Holly established the ranch at a time when Colorado’s early dependence on mining ventures increasingly gave way to agricultural development.

Built under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, the building is associated with the federal relief programs administered in Eastern Colorado during the Great Depression.  Providing employment and increased job skills for the area’s unemployed, construction began on the Holly Gym in 1936 utilizing a locally quarried chalk-like stone - Niobrara.  The WPA created an opportunity to provide the town with a more “progressive” educational facility.