Trip Through History

On Christmas Day in 1902 my grandparents, George E. Polhill and Lydia M. Doolin, were married in Weston, Colorado, by the groom's father, George W. Polhill, the local Justice of the Peace. George was a mason, working for CF&I Steel Co. and living in Segundo. I began looking into these facts more than a decade ago when it became possible to get specialty license plates if you were from a pioneer family--meaning a family that had come to Colorado before 1900. Weston and Segundo are on Colorado Hwy 12, the Scenic Highway of Legends, that runs from LaVeta over to Trinidad. As we have done before, today John and I drove that beautiful highway.

As we drove through LaVeta, we saw this doe mule deer and her triplets, right in town. I wasn't able to get mother and all three babies on one photo, but you can see two of the fawns.



Here is one of the many stone dikes visible along Hwy 12 through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.



Our first stop was in Cuchara, a small tourist town, that has a few shops and restaurants and the Timbers lodge and restaurant. John is standing on the covered porch in front of the Timbers. I just love the pine bark slabs that decorate the building.





There was more beautiful vistas as we drove over Cuchara Pass, where my great-grandfather had homesteaded in July 1885.



We spotted this tiny cemetery along the road and pulled off to take a look. There were two headstones with names--neither of them my family.



This is the steeple on an old church in Weston. I don't where my great-grandparents'
home was. Perhaps they lived on the homestead north of here.



Another picture of a church steeple, this one in Segundo, I think. CF&I (Colorado Fuel and Iron) had a steel mill in Pueblo and a number of coal mines up what is now Hwy 12 north of Trinidad. The first coal mine was named Primero, the next Segundo, the next Tercio (Spanish for 1, 2 and 3). When the mines were operating, the company ran a train up the valley each day to pick up children and take them to school. You can read more about the early coal mining in this area here.



This is what is left of coke ovens at Cokedale, a town just outside Trinidad. It was here that local coal was made into coke. For more information about Cokedale, click here.



Now the Post Office and Cokedale Town Hall, this building was originally the Gottlieb Mercantile Company.





We drove on to Trinidad, where we had great meatball sandwiches at Nana and Nano's Montleones Pasta and Deli, then we drove back home to Lathrop. It was a scenic and fun day.