NOTE: The interviewer s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets.

Transcription

1 PETER REYNOLDS. Transcript of OH 1476V This interview was recorded on October 10, 2007, for Boulder County Parks and Open Space. A copy of the interview has been donated to the Maria Rogers Oral History Program, located at the Carnegie Library for Local History in Boulder, Colorado. The interviewer is Liz McCutcheon. The interview also is available in video format, filmed by Bob Dornan. Sandy Grabowski transcribed the interview. NOTE: The interviewer s questions and comments appear in parentheses. Added material appears in brackets. ABSTRACT: Peter Reynolds talks about Reynolds family history; the Reynolds Ranch, including the ranch house that was built in the mid-1800s; recreation and projects on the ranch when he was a child; tungsten mining; and the land during the 1960s, including building a bomb shelter and making plans in case of nuclear war, and hippies who hung the area around during that time period. [A]. 00:00 (I m Liz McCutcheon here with Peter Reynolds to talk about the Reynolds Ranch. Bob Dornan is our videographer.) (Let s start with the basics, Pete. When and where were you born?) I was born in Denver. The family story goes that my mom went into labor up here and drove down, my dad drove down for me to be born. It was at Colorado General Hospital, what it used to be called. (That s quite a drive.) I don t think she was that close. I think she was just starting to have labor pains. It wasn t a sudden, hurried thing. (So it was not at some risk of side of the road?) No, no being delivered on a highway. (That s good. Let s talk about the property. We re sitting in front of the old ranch house. Do you know let s start with this building. Do you know when this was built?) We don t know exactly. On one of the logs that was used in the roof, the date 1865 is scratched on there, so we ve always assumed that the logs were cut at about that time. We don t know when the building was put up there. Probably three or four buildings in this area are of a very similar style that were put up at about the same time. So it s got to be mid-1860s,

2 (Was the whole thing built originally? There s one section here that looks like it s stone.) Right. The initial part was the log, the hewn log structure. Originally it was intended as a hay storage barn, and then the stone part was added later. I don t have any real idea when the stone was added. (This is still an active cabin that is still used and leased by your family?) Yes. That s correct. (That s great. What do you know about the early history of this property?) Well, it was homesteaded back in the 1860s, and originally it was primarily used for hay. The hay meadows were hayed, and the hay was hauled over to Central City, where it powered the donkeys that powered the mines during the Gold Rush in Central City. As most of these mountain properties did, once it was homesteaded, it traded hands several times after that. A lot of people tried to make a go of it or got the actual title to the land and then moved on. So there were a number of owners and speculators that owned it over a period of time. There was at one time about 1914, 1915 when they were first starting to talk about building Barker Dam, speculators bought up a lot of this property as potential dam site, and I think this was purchased then. Then it had several owners that were involved in tungsten mining after that, and then my grandfather bought it from a tungsten miner, basically, in 46 or 47. (Were there any big tungsten mines on this property, or they were just looking for it?) There were some productive mines here. There were probably two, possibly three that were actually of a production-type size. A lot of speculative-type things, and a lot of very small sites that people would work periodically during periods of time during the year looking for that mother lode. But there were one or two that were actually sizeable. (When your grandfather bought it, what was his intention?) He probably had three intentions. My grandmother was born up in Virginia Dale, up on the Wyoming state line, and she had her father was a cowboy sheepherder, had worked ranches and everything, and she grew up in a rural setting. I think she kind of missed that, living in Boulder. My grandfather was a machinist down in Boulder. So I think she was kind of pushing to get a rural property. Secondly, he was a machinist and had a lot of stuff. [laughs] And I think he realized that he needed to put that stuff somewhere, and there was plenty of acreage up here for that. Thirdly, he was also interested in the mining. He was kind of a he knew a lot about geology and was interested in the mining aspect of it. (Was he going looking for?) He spent weekend and spare hours a lot of times just hiking around looking for potential spots. He had an old bulldozer up here, and he would go and push holes out and look for stuff, trying to find veins of tungsten. 05:19 (Something I read said that he also bought some mining claims?) 2

3 Right. He added to the original property over the years and did a few trades, but I think he took it from I think initially when he bought it, it was maybe 600, 700 acres, and he added about 200 acres of mining claims. (Your family never lived up here? This was really just always a vacation spot?) Right. Well, I think after World War II, when my dad came back from the Navy, he spent some time living up here. That was before I came along. And then I lived up here for seven or eight years during the 70s. But the rest of it has been mostly summertime and weekend-type use. (Does the cabin have electricity and running water?) It does now. I can remember, one of my earlier memories, having just kerosene lanterns and having to go down over the hill to get water and stuff like that. I think we got electricity up here in about 53, 54, something like that. (Is there a variety of different type of land on the property?) Oh, yeah. There s meadow there s probably about 250 acres of alpine meadow-type property, and most of the rest of it is heavily treed, forested, hilly-type stuff. Most of the mining claims, of course, weren t out in the meadows, and that had already been agricultural patented anyway. So most of those mining claims are on the steep hillsides and the heavily forested type stuff. (Did your grandfather ever find anything when he was out looking?) Oh, yeah, he found a lot. The thing with tungsten was that it wasn t really very profitable to extract it. There was a big boom during World War I. That s when most of the activity around here got going at a fever pitch. There was a big mill in Nederland, and a lot of that activity happened then. It sort of resurfaced again in World War II, but Korea was able to produce their labor costs were much less. So it never really took off again after that first big boom in World War I. But like all miners, I think everybody who s sort of obsessed with mining thinks that some day that s going to happen and people are going to need this. So yeah, he actually found quite a bit of it and had it stockpiled and stashed away in different places. (When your family sold the property to the county, the mining claims went with it?) Went with it, yes, that s correct. (Can I ask why the decision to sell the property to the county?) Oh, yeah. When my grandfather passed away, he had never really made a clear will, and my aunt and my father weren t sure what to do with it. There was some disagreement between the two of them. Immediately upon his passing, it seemed that there were a lot of real estate speculators that were moving in to try and lock the property up in some way or another. And we were fortunate that John McKenzie who is an attorney in Boulder his father was a childhood friend of my father, and he was doing some work for Boulder County at the time, and when he heard that this property might be available, he approached my dad and my dad was open to his way of thinking, 3

4 since it was kind of a family friend, as was my aunt. So they were able to make an agreement on that basis. (And kept it from the developers?) Yes. Yes, I think that was an important thing. (It s a beautiful spot up here. I m going to want to talk about the other buildings on the property, but let s save that till the end. I assume most of them are around here and we could walk and actually film them and talk about what it is we re looking at?) Sure. Right. 09:49 (I want to talk a little bit about your family and when and how your family came to be in this area.) Well, my grandfather was the one who came out here. His father had worked for the Kellogg family in Battle Creek, Michigan. They were members of the Seventh Day Adventists Church. And when the Seventh Day Adventists decided to build a sanitarium in Boulder, he came out to do the boiler work and pipefitting and all that stuff. He was a plumber and pipefitter. So they came out here to do that, and he worked there and they got the sanitarium started, and then he decided he wanted to try his hand at ranching. So they went down to Rocky Ford and spent a while down there and decided that didn t work out too well. They spent a brief time in Colorado Springs, where my grandfather actually swept out the lab for Nikola Tesla, the electricity and radio guy who was in Colorado Springs for a while. Then they came up to the Hygiene area first, and then opened up the machine shop in Boulder in So that s how they got here. My mom, her family were from California, and my dad was going to college out there, and that s how he met her. Her parents had actually served as missionaries, also Seventh Day Adventists, in China, so my mom was actually born there. They got married and then my dad went into the service, into the Navy. And when he came back, they started off up here. He was gonna go into the cattle business, and after he did that for a while, he decided that he d rather be in medicine. He d always wanted to be a doctor but sort of set that aside. So he came back here for a while and then went to medical school and became a doctor. (Your grandfather you mentioned one of the reasons your grandfather probably bought the place is that he had a lot of stuff that he had to put some place. What kind of stuff are you talking about?) They did work for the Switzerland Trail, they did railroad-type maintenance. They would work on the tires of the locomotives. He had that kind of stuff. He was kind of a packrat. And then they also, during the wartime, they had a very large production of defense-type stuff, they had a lot of contracts, and then some of that machinery afterward he didn t really need, but it seemed to him that he d better not get rid of it, he ought to just hold onto it, because he might need it some time. And he had they worked for different mining outfits and operations, they d take care of their machinery. So they he ended up with a lot of that stuff that either people didn t come back to claim or couldn t pay for or just didn t want any more. So he had a lot of things. 4

5 And then he also was actually cutting down the size of the machine shop after the war, and as I say, didn t want to get rid of anything, so he stored it all up here. So there were old a blacksmithing forge, there were some old Fairbanks Morse one-cylinder pump and winch-type engines that are actually over in the Nederland mining museum now. Just a lot of stuff. (So I take it most of that stuff has now moved on to new homes?) Most of it. There are still a few odds and ends down there. (I noticed one ) That s a bailer. That s actually agricultural equipment. There was some agricultural in fact, I think that bailer was on the property when we bought it. There was another stationary bailer that stays in place. That s one that you pull across the field. And there was an old mowing machine. Some hay stuff, because when my dad first came back here, he decided to put up the hay and all those things. So they used the equipment that had come with the place. (Turnkey operation!) Yeah, well. Sort of. It didn t have the another one of those funny stories is, when my dad came back, they decided that they were going to put up the hay. My grandmother, who was the only one who really knew about how to do these things, had to be down in Boulder for a few days, so while she was gone, my dad decided to go ahead and get the hay done. So he cut and baled and stacked and everything, all within a period of three days. Well, the hay needs to dry [laughs] for a period of time so it s dry enough so it doesn t essentially it could catch fire in the bales because it s too wet. And he didn t know that. So when my grandmother came back, she was just he was all proud of, I got the hay all done! And she said, No way! You ve got to take it all out of there, cut open all the bales, let it dry out. So the knowledge was one thing that was lacking in the turnkey operation. (Learning the hard way, I guess.) Yeah, that s right. 15:31 (You mentioned fire. Have there been any fires on this property, in your knowledge?) There have been a long time ago. You can see that there s some older stumps and things in different places that are charred. But they would probably have been a Douglas fir growth that was gone and replaced by lodge pole. But during my lifetime, we haven t had a fire. Knock on wood. We haven t had a fire up here during my lifetime, or during the period that we ve owned it. (You re leasing it from the county. Is that in perpetuity?) No, I think it expires in And I also have the grazing rights, which I m not using right now. I ve actually sublet them to somebody else who used them this summer. (You ve got a lot of good grass up here.) 5

6 Yeah, this was a good year. Yeah, I think this was a good grass year. I ve sure seen it a lot worse. (Now we re right off Magnolia Road here. You mentioned that that used to be a major hauling road.) Right. When they were building Gross Dam and this is one of my younger memories the trucks came from Sulfide Flats up by Eldora. And came back across on what we kind of called West Magnolia and came right down here, and went down what s now the Lazy Z road into Gross Dam. And that was where they hauled all the material from that they used to build the dam. That probably finished in about 56 or 57. So, they were probably working on that for those four or five years before that. (When you lived up here, what did you do for fun?) When I was living up here? (Yes, and as a kid when you presumably came up here for vacations too?) Well, it s about 940 acres. There are all kinds of hikes that a kid can take. We had my sister and I would play on the old equipment that my grandfather stored down there. We used our imaginations and turned things into cars and whatever. My grandmother would always have projects for us to do. We d work on those. One time we built a little fishpond. We made it out of concrete and went down to the Woolworth s in Boulder to get some goldfish. They didn t last too long [laughs]. I think about one night [laughs] was about it. (Isn t it a little cold for a goldfish?) Yes, I think it s a little chilly up here for goldfish. Our pond wasn t very leak-proof. It tended to be sort of dry the next day. Occasionally we d take jeep trips and things like that. My grandfather was always scouting out different places around here. He was kind of a history buff too to a certain extent, so we got to visit some of the ghost towns that were over in this area when they were still ghost towns. I can remember going to Apex when it was still you could see that it had been a town. You could pick out the building that had been the saloon. If I remember right, there was even an old piano in that building at the time we were there. We d take trips over Rollins Pass do the usual kinds of things. Back when the tunnel was open and all that kind of stuff. But there was never a lack of things to do, especially for a kid with this much ground to ramble around on. I was familiar enough with property from an early time from having worked on the fences, that I didn t ever get lost. It wasn t a worry that I would wander off, or at that time, that you d be kidnapped. When I was sixteen, we rebuilt a jeep down in Boulder. Because it was closer to the machine shop, we could do the work. And then I was assigned to be the one who drove it up here after we got it rebuilt. Well, something happened. I came up Magnolia, and down at about the Kekionga Mine, just when you kind of start up that first set of switchbacks, it broke down. So I had to walk 6

7 the rest of the way. I must have been about 16 or 17. I don t even know if I had a driver s license [laughs] to be honest. In that walk from down there on Magnolia to up here, there were only at that time two houses that you saw. There was the old Hendricks place, which is where Twin Sisters is now that white house that sits close to the road was there. There were a couple of mailboxes, that I don t know where the houses were. They were well off the road. Then the Scates Ranch that s down by Road 69. Those were the only two places that were here. This would be beyond the Magnolia town site. That was all there was. There just weren t very many people up here. So it wasn t really a big concern that anything would happen to a kid. I mean, I could fall down a mine hole, but we were very well schooled in what the consequences of that. I never because I had the fear of a mine collapse I never even messed with them. But we never had a lot of trouble finding something to do. 21:30 (Now, you said that you actually lived here for some period of time year-round.) Yes. (How much snow do you get up here?) Well, it depends of course on the year. There are these years that you get a lot. During the midto late-70s when I was here, they were pretty dry years, so we didn t have a lot. The biggest thing up here, when it does snow, the wind comes up not too long afterwards and drifts it all. You get more difficulty dealing with snowdrifts than the actual snowfall itself. The ones in the spring are the ones that are the killers because it s heavy, wet snow. You get two or three feet of that and you re stuck here for a while. (So, you have been snowed in up here?) Yes, a couple of times. A couple of times on weekend trips up, we can t get out. A couple of times when I was living up here I couldn t get out. You always have to have something on hand in the pantry, [laughs] because you just never know. (Never eat it all the way down to zero.) That s right. (Do you have any other stories you know about the land or the property? You ve told a couple that I think really give a sense of what it s like to be up here, but are there others?) During the early 60s, when the Cuban missile crisis hit, my grandfather and father got together and build a bomb shelter over here on the north side of the house. We had that stocked with water. My grandfather bought a couple of 55-gallon drums and filled them with wheat and staples that we thought we would need when the bombs fell. I guess everybody that lived through that had some contingency plan in mind for that situation. (You didn t come and say up here for some period of time?) 7

8 No, there wasn t any need, but my parents told me that if anything happens, you get to the ranch. My dad was always one for teaching me how to learn where I was and essentially sort of do direction finding. He would take me out on the property and say, Okay, now find your way back. We would do that. He d take me out to places fishing where I d never been before. We d get somewhere and fish down a creek or something like that, and he d say, Okay, now go back to the car. I d have to figure out how to do that. So, they always said well told me which streets to take and where to turn if I had to walk or hitchhike, but they always said, If something happens and you can t find us, come up here. 24:37 (Did you have any trouble with squatters coming onto the land, especially during the hippie era?) Yeah, yeah, there was some of that. I failed out of my first year of college, and came back here in the winter of That was about the time that California was going to drop off the edge of the earth the earthquake was going to hit. So, there were a lot of people that were just kinda coming out here and setting up camp for periods of time. I d see people in school buses walking barefoot in December and January [laughs] trying to get along. I didn t get involved in them, but there were a lot of them. I think my sympathies lay more with the people from the hippie-types than with the sort of local rednecks. I was never really part of that group. There were a lot of fights and hostility in Nederland the town itself. A lot of people didn t want those people around. (Did you have people camping out on the ranch here?) Some, yeah, a few. Usually if you asked them to go, they d go. It probably has been sort of steady. There are still people who do that. You can still come across a camp where somebody is obviously been staying for a while. I think even recently with the advent of the internet, that whole area up on West Magnolia, which would be west of the Peak to Peak, was even mentioned on an internet site for people you can camp here for free. Well, you can t [laughs]. But anyway, it got up there. So we had some overflow from that for a couple of years. People are always going to try to do that with as big a property as this is. (Is there anything else you can share about the property or what it is like up here that I haven t thought to ask?) Well, I mentioned the wind. The wind does blow up here. During the wintertime of course this is an older house but you can be sitting in this house and papers on the dining room table could rustle during the gusts. I ve heard a lot of wind stories up here. Everybody has who has been around. It s windy in the winter. And the winter is long. The other thing that was always kind of depressing living up here was that you d go down to town in April or May and everybody is out with shorts on and playing Frisbee in the park and all this kind of stuff. You have to come back up here and still build a fire. The spring is slow to come and summer is very slow to come. It s really mid to late June before it really starts feeling consistently warm. You ve got a real muddy period of time in there too, when all of the snow is melting out of the trees and that kind of stuff. Once summer comes, it s glorious. (Yes, I was going to say that in winter you could end up with a serious case of cabin fever.) 8

9 I didn t because I always got out. When I was living here in the 70s, I was usually working in town. The drive up and down isn t that much fun, but it s doable. Even if it s windy and cold I would cross-country ski a lot, so I skied around on the property and hiked on the property. I never really ended up with of course you always had to keep splitting wood because I was always heating with wood when I was up here. So, I stayed busy. But you see a tendency I think people tend to buy property up here in the summertime when everything looks real nice. By the next spring, along with the wildflowers, the for-sale signs pop up [laughs]. If you re not ready for it, it can be a pretty rough winter. (Anything else?) I don t think of anything right now. Do you want to go and look at some of the other buildings? (What I would love to do is maybe starting with this, we ll back up, get the camera far enough away that we can really look at the property and then go around and see what the other buildings are.) [This next section of the recording is best viewed in video recording, which is available for viewing at the Carnegie Library for Local History, 1125 Pine St., Boulder, CO.] OK, sounds good. 29:27 (This is the view off the porch of the cabin.) [pause while camera pans] (This is the cabin where we were that the original part is the wood, and then the stone addition.) [pause] 30:03 my grandfather and my father and I built in the late 70s. My dad tried to use as few modern hardware items as possible. He ended up pegging, doweling all the beams together. A lot of the lumber was cut on the place after the Ponderosa pine beetle epidemic in the late 70s. There was a lot of wood around. We used as much of that, that was actually sawed on the property, as we could. (What did you use the barn for?) My dad was Jeffersonian [laughs]. He had this idea that if the barn was here, down below that there s a pond. He thought it would be ideal to have the livestock be able to go out to the pond down below there. What he didn t realize is that the pond area was a total swamp. It never dried out. It was always wet. The wind howls down that draw there at about 70 miles an hour in the wintertime. My grandfather knew that, and I knew that, but we couldn t argue with my dad. Since he was fundamentally bankrolling the project, we didn t argue too much. It s a nice building, but it never did work out for the practical intent that he had in mind. It was kind of a combination of Jeffersonian ideas and Eric Sloane barn books that sort of motivated that. Some hikes and bike rides up here. But they had the directions all wrong, so people wander around out there quite a bit. I ve had people come in here and ask how to get to get to what, you know. I think they re sort of open, but not totally, officially. 9

10 (You certainly don t see any trail heads.) No. There hasn t been a ribbon cutting or anything like that (So this is all or some of your dad s animal project?) This is my dad s animal project. I tried as much as I could to make it work, but I had some heifers that I had to calve out one year. It was just a nightmare, because they had their calves down there and they d just fall into the swamp. I was really frustrated [laughs]. Actually, up on the top of this hill is where my grandfather and grandmother and mother are all buried. We scattered Dad s ashes up there. There s kind of a family burial plot up there. [pause] Up on that hillside, that ridge across from the grassy area there, there s an old miner s cabin that s kind of falling down. It s been there probably from, I would say, the early 1900s. A lot of baking powder cans. A lot of chewing tobacco, Prince Albert cans, things like that. You can tell that the miners were not a lot. Probably a lot of pancakes and lard [laughs]. Those kinds of things. Not a great diet. Over the years those cans and bottles have all been picked off. There s not too much left of it any more. (Pete, I want to thank you very much for giving us a little bit of background on the ranch and showing us around. We really appreciate it.) You re very welcome. 34:11 [end of interview] 10