Greenwood Area History

The following is from the Denver Post, September 10, 1933.  

Canon Echo

Written by Caroline Bancroft

Denver boasts a unique colony.  Out where the High Line ditch circles about south of Cherry Hills and where Little Dry creek cleaves the rolling prairies with an occasional trickle, a settlement of ranchers, tenant farmers, country residents and society suburbanites have banded together in a type of civilization reminiscent of an English village or of Virginia landowners.  Here is a community feeling based on the friendliness of the outdoors.

The ranchers tend great fields of grain some of them a mile on the side; the farmers raise vegetables, honey and squabe; the country residents hoe and water individual flower gardens, trading slips and roots, and the suburbanites ride horseback, take long country walks and on winter evenings gather at each other's houses for poetry reading, bridge, charades, and discussion.

This was the locality that rightfully should have endured, for here it that the Russell brothers prospecting in 1858, first panned gold - gold that was to bring Colorado into the national limelight and eventually raise a pioneer territory to "Centennial statehood."  Nor has this spot ever failed the assiduous panner.  Year in and year out a few dollars worth of gold could be washed each day and even now a $400-placer mining machine has been at work, a quarter of a mile above the Charles R. Enos place, most of the summer season.

But most of the amusements of the community end far more happily. Communal mixed-sexes baseball games on spring Sunday afternoons, skiing to each other's houses on winter evenings, gardening, painting, writing, criticism - all go to make up the especial quality of this group.

Allen True decorated his house with his own murals. Mrs. H.P.D. Hunter, who recently left the colony to move east, did all her own gardening.  Mrs. Charles R. Enos has some of her own oil portraits and paintings as wall decorations.  Mr. and Mrs. Carleton Talcott painted their own nursery of three to four hundred trees and Churchill Own cuts his own grass besides sitting on the Arapahoe county Cherry Hills district school board.

The schoolhouse of this colony is another unique feature.  Two years ago the little country schoolhouse of the district burned down and the board decided to erect in its place a model school house of the rural type. 

The completed building stands at University boulevard and Green avenue and boasts an auditorium, four classrooms, a principal's office and a kitchen.  It is equipped for all sorts of progressive additions to the curriculum and for extra-curricular activities such as Parent-Techer association, plays and social entertainments.  Here the children of the district among them the children of Dr. Amos Beaghler, head of the health board of the Denver schools, receive their educations.

One of their object walks takes them up the hill to where the High Line ditch crosses Littel Dry creek, hot by an ordinary flume, but by a syphon which, at the time of its construction in 1906, was considered quite an engineering feat.  The swirling water is quite dangerous because of the suction and forms a spot the canoeists are careful to avoid.  But it bakes an exciting illustration of one of the laws of physics for growing minds.

Reality, informality and taste all combine to give this settlement its especial atmosphere.  Like Topsy, "it just growed".  From the time when the Luesus Hailetts, shortly after the World War, chose "Meadow Lark" (now the Morrison Shafroth place) as a summer residents there has been quiet but steady movement to this spot five miles beyond University park.  Some newcomers have built elaborate places, some very simple, and others have rented the little farmhouses that dotted the country and fixed them up.

The colony claims, or has claimed, as residents at one time, the William D. Lippitts, the James B. Grants, the John T. Barnitts, the Churchill Owens, Merrison Shafroths, Allen Trues, Roland Enos, Charleton, Talcotts, the Junior George Bergers, Harold Hunters, Andrew Andersons, George Ganos, Alexis Fosters, Walter Strubys, Mrs. F.W. Bunker and many other prominent names.

Denver claims the people, Englewood claims the telephones and Littleton claims the post boxes - which only proves our contention that here is an unusual colony, setting a graceful style of living.

Beneath a brilliant Colorado sun by day and night time beneath tall poplars that coruscated silver in the moonlight, this little colony preserves a pride of pioneer heritage. 

If you don't already know it, drive out and look around some day.