The M.J. Patterson Contracting Company of Denver completed this pin-connected, six-panel steel Pratt pony truss in 1901.

The 1892 Coal Creek School is a good example of a one-room rural schoolhouse that has also served as a community gathering space and polling place for several decades.  The coal shed/privy and horse shed remain on the property. 

The site is important for its use by Utes well into the late 19th century during their annual fall and winter gathering of pinyon nuts in the surrounding area.

In September of 1879, Ute warriors skirmished here with troops under the command of Major T.T. Thornburgh as the troops entered the Ute Reservation on an expedition from Fort Steele, Wyoming to the White River Agency in northwestern Colorado. 

The 1938 building served as an annex to the adjacent high school and provided space for classes in agriculture, a blacksmith shop for manual training, and a sound-proof music room for the band and orchestra.  While successfully serving these purposes, the building went on to provide other educational opportunities. 

The park is associated with several Great Depression era federal relief programs.  Constructed between 1933 and 1938 under the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), creation of the park provided a source of employment in Lamar during much of the Depression.  Willow Creek Park was Colorado’s first CWA project and the first planned park in Lamar, providing a location for active and passive recreation activities. 

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.