Early Days in South Park: Parked in the Past by Laura Van Dusen

by Laura Van Dusen

Historian and journalist Laura Van Dusen brings the people, places, and lifestyles of early South Park residents to life through her easy-to-read and enjoyable writing style.A reader will gain a prospective of pioneer life through the biographies of Wilbur Fisk Stone, Edward L. Thayer, Lewis Link and Willia Hamilton Johnson. In South Park's beginning, two towns were simultaneously named Como. One remains today, a mere ghost of its rough start. Was Balfour formed as a nefarious real estate scheme, or did the founders truly believe there was gold underground? In the high mountain valley of South Park, gold and silver reigned, but not all treasures brought financial gain. Porcupine Cave is proof of that, where fossils of Ice Age animals attract national interest even today.  Early Days in South Park  contains nineteen entertaining and true tales of central Colorado history.

192 pages, Paperback

Published July 20, 2016

Reviews

[Linda Appelbaum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty enjoyable, informative book about South Park and the area around F airplay, Alma and Como with a just enough details to make it interesting and not read like a boring history.

[Roxie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a little hesitant to start this read, thinking it might be simply a list of dates, names, and long-ago events that, while important history, were not necessarily fascinating. I was wrong, and YOU should not hesitate to dive into this beautifully written presentation of the lives and accomplishments of men and women who ventured to South Park, CO, set up their homesteads and towns around gold mines and coal mines, brought in and channeled precious water, set up hotels, left remnants of their efforts when they moved on to other mines, other hills, other ventures.

As many times in my life as I've driven through that broad, beautiful, treeless, windswept stretch of open country, I never imagined cattle ranchers and city dwellers actually fighting over the water that flows through it. It happened - just like in the movies. In fact, it most likely inspired some movies. Water, as vital as it is today, sent forward to the city growing on the Front Range, leaving the land along its course parched and empty. Coal mined for the Railroad, giving so many young men work and a way to establish themselves; and sometimes blowing them to bits in deadly explosions that stole their futures... and who knew Chinese and Italians were forbidden to work in one coal mine way back when? Now I know.

Laura has such a smooth way with words; skillfully tying the present to the past with such quiet ease, you just follow without thinking, or wondering where/if you've heard it somewhere before. You are just there...standing on a street corner in present day Denver in one sentence. Standing on a street in Alma, or Fairplay, or King in 1890 in the next sentence, as naturally transported as if time travel really does exist.

READ THIS...You'll never again just whiz through small towns in the hills, or on the plains without thinking about the people who initially arrived there, worked and prospered, then died out around mines and "progress" in the old days. Huzzah!