The Wagon Road Ranch, Durango

In prehistoric times the Junction Creek and Falls Creek area was the home of many hundreds of Anasazi Indians. It was a successful hunting and farming area for a population many times that of current times.

The Wagon Road Ranch parcel was originally laid out around 1878 by a pioneer family looking for a place to ranch and farm. When first settled by white settlers, the Junction Creek Valley was mostly Agricultural in nature, now the area is a serene and scenic site for small ranches and homes. It is popular to hikers, bicyclers and horseback riders as the main access to the Colorado Trail that winds from Durango to Denver.

The Ranch house log cabin was built in the 1940’s as a turkey farm by the Claude Crane Family. Mrs. Crane was an avid mineralogist and hand-picked many of the beautiful rocks that were installed in the fireplaces. The next family to live there was the Canode Family followed by Durango’s first Radiologist, Dr. and Mrs John Watson.

Dr. Watson loved to use the ranch to practice his equestrian skills and was very skilled at calf roping. The family lived there for over 40 years and helped to keep the property a pristine and scenic setting.

In December 2003, Rod and Laurie Barker purchased the property from John and Janet and have had a wonderful time adding touches of their own, including two trout ponds, 70 fruit trees, a few golf holes, a 15,000 square foot garden and, of course, the rooms addition onto the main house.

The name “Wagon Road Ranch” comes from the old wagon road that Rod discovered in the fir forest on the west side of the property. The road was the main line between Durango and the La Plata silver mines on the East side of the La Plata Mountains. Rod and his friend Charlie Schumacher restored an 1890’s vintage John Deere grain wagon that once belonged to Rod’s Great Grandfather, Jim Jarvis.

Jim and his wife Ida used the wagon on their honeymoon to travel from Durango to Telluride and back. There is also a beautiful black and red buckboard wagon that belonged to Art and Anne Isgar. The two wagons are featured near the Ranch house. The old wagon road is a very interesting place to walk and wonder about the many old wagon trips that once went along the abandoned road. It is also a great place to birdwatch.

A Brief History of Durango, Colorado

Durango, Colorado, sits in the midst of some of the world’s most beautiful mountain scenery, a richness that is only matched by its colorful history.

Indeed, “them thar hills were filled with silver and gold,” and miners by the scores began to flock to the area in the 1870s. The town of Durango itself was the child of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad Company, established in 1879. Company management planned and laid out the charming downtown that remains today, though when the railroad first “arrived” in town on August 5, 1881, Durango was dubbed the “Smelter City” and “the new city in the wilderness,” as it was host to the region’s growing smelting, mining and agricultural economy.

With the then state-of-the-art rail transportation and the “quick money” made by the area’s miners, enterprising merchants, saloon gals, ranchers and farmers soon settled into the valley, giving a balance to the city’s economy and culture. The newcomers built churches, schools and many of the fine buildings and Victorian homes still standing today. Durango was designed to be the most “up-to-date” city in Colorado. Nothing could compare to it, if her boosters had anything to say about it. Signs of progress began to appear everywhere in the late 1880s and early 1890s, including a grand hotel (the four-story brick Strater), electric lights with a home owned electric company, the telephone, and electric trolley and a three-story sky scraper with an electric elevator (Newman Building – 800 Main).

The growing business district on Main Avenue and grand homes on the 3rd Avenue Boulevard helped Durango fulfill its self-proclaimed destiny as the business capital of the region. Its brilliant future as a residential and business center for the Four Corners region became ever more secure.

In recent years, Durango has become less and less dependant upon mining, and increasingly diversified with tourism, oil & gas production, higher education and clean, light industry. Fort Lewis College, Colorado’s “Campus in the Sky,” contributes greatly to the stature and personality of the community.

The area’s rich history actually predates the development of Durango by at least 1,300 years. The mild climate, fertile soils and abundant wild game first attracted the ancestral Puebloan culture around 700 AD, and at one time, the area’s human population was actually larger then than it is today. Some of the most spectacular and well-preserved Puebloan ruins in the United States are found within a 100-mile radius of the Strater Hotel. The government has declared many sites protected for the express purpose of studying the ancient inhabitants of this area.

The most famous site containing ruins of the complete Ancestral Puebloan development is, of course, Mesa Verde National Park. However, to the south are the Aztec Ruins, Chaco Canyon, and the Salmon Ruins that display the Ancestral Puebloan culture in its various stages of development and decline.

At a time when Durango’s future still hung in the balance – would it remain a mining camp or become a metropolis? – a Cleveland pharmacist named Henry Strater had the vision and the faith that Durango would prosper. And with its prosperity, it would need a grand hotel. Strater had the nerve and drive, but he also had three minor handicaps. He lacked sufficient money, he had no experience in the hotel business, and he was still a minor and legally could not enter into a contract. Undaunted, he fibbed a bit about his age, borrowed the money, and plowed ahead. Construction was quite a challenge, but with the help of his brother Fred and Father Antone, and a lot of enthusiasm, Henry’s dream was realized. The Strater Hotel opened after an expenditure of $70,000, and placement of 376,000 native red bricks and hand-carved sandstone cornices and sills.