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In 1888, while the little town of Boston was fighting for survival on the southeastern Colorado plains, newspaperman and town booster Sam Konkel chose a confident motto for his Western World: “Railroads A Moral Certainty.” There was considerably more certainty than railroad. For the founders of Boston and the other boomtowns scattered across southeastern Colorado…
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Baca County has always been farm country, and in the fall of 1931 Springfield was talking about a rather unusual harvest. It wasn’t wheat, broomcorn or feed. This time the crop was tonsils and adenoids, and before it was over, some 400 people had reportedly undergone operations at a free clinic in Springfield. The story…
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The years 1934 and 1935 were arguably about as tough as the Dust Bowl ever got in Baca County. The country was dry, crops were failing, dirt was moving and times were already plenty hard without Mother Nature piling on. Yet buried in the newspapers from those two years is a curious part of the…
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History and Stories
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By Steve Doner and Kent Brooks In the block towards the rising sun we found Charley Malmberg trying to pound the stuffin out of a piece of iron. We don’t know whether Charley has planted the famous chestnut tree or not, but if he hasn’t he ought to, as he has the ideal shop. Springfield…
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History often hides in plain sight. We have often written of the Jennings clan’s time in Southeast Colorado. Much of that is in my book “Old Boston: As Wild As They Come,” We recently stumbled upon a remarkable photograph of a routine day in Woodward, Oklahoma, dated 1901, showing broomcorn being delivered. But behind the…
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By: Yann and sod Some of us have been enjoying the interesting posts about our region on a Facebook page titled Colmexhoma, USA. (Colorado+New Mexico+Oklahoma) Kent Brooks and I thought the creator must be from Boise City, OK, or Clayton, NM, or somewhere south of us, and that we needed to get acquainted with this…
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In the late 19th century, a feverish wave of migration swept toward the Western frontier. While the transcontinental railroad brought settlers to the edge of the plains, the tracks only went so far. To bridge the gap between the railheads and the remote “boom towns” of Southeast Colorado, a vital network of stagecoach lines emerged.…
