Welcome to the COlorado COmmunity Open Thread for Wednesday, August 5, 2015! I'm Sean, DK user thanatokephaloides, and I'd like to introduce myself and talk a little bit about my area, the Pikes Peak Region.
On beyond the fold.....
I live in an area known as the Pikes Peak Region of Colorado. This area has undergone some significant changes in the approximately 120 years that my father's family has been here. When my great-grandfather first arrived in Colorado Springs in the late 1890's, what is now Colorado Springs was the town of that name, a resort hamlet founded by Civil War General William J. Palmer, surrounded by numerous other little towns like Pikeview, Cragmor, Manitou, and Fountain.
One of the reasons for this little situation was that Palmer was somewhat of a snob, and he declared that no workingman, carrying a lunch-pail, would ever be seen on the streets of Colorado Springs. Of course, to a very great extent, this was a direct shot into his own foot, as his Denver and Rio Grande Railroad operated major facilities right in the middle of Colorado Springs.(These facilities are still there, by the way.) Pikeview was to the north and northwest of Colorado Springs; it made its living mining the coal which the Pope brothers found there. No question of workingmen and lunch pails on those streets!
Palmer's vision of "Little London in the Rockies" failed for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Palmer's wife, Queen, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the project. She felt that Palmer was trying to get her to live in an uncivilizable desert, and far preferred the long-settled and civilized European Continent to Colorado. There is some information that this wasn't entirely attitudinal, but was due to Queen suffering from continuous altitude sickness. She left the Palmer family home, Glen Eyrie, in 1885, never to return. Palmer spent the rest of his life shuttling between Colorado (where his life and business interests were) and England (where Queen was) until December 27, 1894 when Queen died in England.
More later -- this turned out to be a larger doing than I expected!
;-)