Dr. Frank Finney’s 1899 house exhibits the most lavishly detailed exterior in this Plains community. 

he Elks Lodge # 701 building has served as the headquarters of La Junta’s primary fraternal service organization since the lodge’s establishment in 1901.  The building exhibits an intact and well executed 1950 facade modernization. 

This site northeast of La Junta once contained Bent’s Old Fort, an important trading post near the Arkansas River along the Mountain Branch of the Santa Fe Trail.  Constructed around 1833 by brothers Charles and William Bent and partner Ceran St. Vrain, the fort occupied an area that at that time was the border between the United States and newly independent Mexico.

These trail segments are part of the larger Santa Fe Trail Mountain Route that provided a vital transportation link between the United States and the newly independent Mexico fostering not only commercial trade, but also establishing social ties that were pivotal to regional development and expansion of the United States from 1832-1879.  Contrary to popular perception, the Santa Fe Trail was not a single trail with two branches, but a complex transportation system made up of various routes, starting points, and destinations.

This large and deep rockshelter, occupied as early as AD 600 to perhaps AD 1500, yielded brownware ceramics, provoking questions as to whether the Pueblos abandoned their territory or were assimilated into a new population and how these changes related to the Ute presence in the area.

The approximately six mile long flume is a three-sided wooden structure attached to the walls of the Dolores and San Miguel Canyons, at a level of 150 to 400 feet above the Dolores and San Miguel Rivers.

Occupied from at least 600 BC to AD 1400, the cave yielded a corn cob dating to about AD 1500, a remarkably late date indicating that prior to European contact with the area, some groups continued to grow corn in western Colorado after the Southwestern "Anasazi" fluorescence.

Completed in 1927, the one-story front gabled roof building has log walls that have been stuccoed, and there is a full length shed roof addition on the south.

A single house ruin, occupied about AD 1100 and then abandoned, Tabeguache Pueblo is a good example of dispersed Pueblo settlement.

This rockshelter produced an early tree-ring record.  Tabeguache Cave is also associated with Clarence Thomas Hurst, a significant figure in Colorado archaeology, who co-founded the Colorado Archaeological Society and Southwestern Lore.