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The arrival of the railroad in Baca County in 1926 changed the possibilities for the county’s growing broomcorn industry. Distance had long been one of the greatest obstacles facing farmers on the isolated southeastern Colorado plains. Broomcorn might command a good price in distant markets, but getting bulky bales to those markets was another matter.…
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Baca County History Book – VOLUME II While manning our booth at the fair, Steve Doner and I discovered how difficult it is to persuade people to submit their stories for Volume II of the Baca County History Book. We heard every excuse imaginable from “I can’t write” to “No one wants to hear about…
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The Life and Legacy of Cowboy Fred Holister By Kent Brooks Great journeys into the past starts with a single question. For this story that question came a few years back (maybe 2015 or 2016) during a visit with my Uncle Harold Brooks. As we sat talking about the old stories and forgotten histories of…
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A look back at the heart of the Southeast Colorado community of Vilas, and a glimpse at how its story might be told in the Digital Age. For the residents of Baca County, Colorado, a Kent Homsher social media post with a single photograph of “Tony’s Market” was enough to unleash a flood of memories…
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A recent Facebook post by Steve Doner shared a brief Springfield Herald clipping (below) dated January 12, 1900, documenting trapping activity along the river in southeastern Colorado. That short notice, combined with a comment recalling wolf trapping by Kent Homsher’s grandfather, prompted a return to the archives and to earlier research I conducted several years…
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In 2014 I gave a talk at the Baca County Museum about a topic I’d heard about my whole life— broomcorn. Ironic, I suppose, that I would give a talk on this topic. I don’t really remember broomcorn and didn’t know much about it. What I knew while giving the talk is that I knew…
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Baca County History Reprint—Project Update If you’ve ever turned a page and seen a face hidden behind scanner streaks, you know why this matters. As part of the reprint, we’ve been repairing photographs that didn’t survive the first round of digitizing—images with horizontal lines, blotchy blacks, and other scan glitches that obscured the very people…
