There was a grand opening for
a Walgreens drugstore in my western Colorado town recently.
I’m sure it was a welcome change for some people, but I
remember the grand old ranch house that once stood in its place.
The house with the wraparound porch was surrounded by an
orchard and majestic cottonwood trees. It had become a restaurant
called the Glen Eyrie, and it provided upscale dining for the
community of Montrose. Many people in town have memories of
celebrating special occasions there, from the birth of a child to a
special anniversary. It’s where my wife and I celebrated the
closing of the contract for the purchase of our first home.
While the restaurant used to be on the outskirts of town,
strip development on the way to booming Ridgway, Colo., had leaped
over it and passed it by. I guess the real surprise was that it
survived as long as it did, considering that the building was
surrounded by chain stores.
Its complete disappearance
led me to recall the early 1980s, when I started work at Mount
Rushmore National Memorial. Many visitors would inquire about any
remaining buildings that might have been used by hard-rock miners
during the 1930s construction. But all but one of the structures
had been torn down or sold off two decades earlier, as the National
Park Service upgraded and modernized its facilities.
Much
of the public came to regret the loss of those buildings. Visitors
wanted to know what it had been like for the people who lived and
worked in the park. It took a while, but the Park Service learned
that its policy of “out with the old” needed more consideration of
the consequences.
Increasingly, Western towns are facing
these same decisions about historic buildings. Grand Junction,
Colo., decided recently to tear down a house more than a century
old to make way for a highway bypass; towns across Wyoming are
seeing historic school buildings demolished, including the Central
Middle School in Sheridan; and century-old mining buildings are
threatened or pulled down in the mountains to increase the market
value of the land.
Long ago, I learned an important
lesson from a good friend who now works at Grand Canyon National
Park. Alice Talakte, a Navajo, said that change, of course, is
inevitable, but that conflict over preservation reveals not only
who you are, but what you might become.
From
Talakte’s perspective, when you lose your traditions —
some of which are wrapped up in the walls of the historic buildings
tucked into each of our towns and cities — you lose your
culture, and as the buildings go, the unique viewpoints and culture
of the West are also lost. Perhaps it is this sentiment that makes
old-timers so melancholy when growth takes off in a town.
The ranch house that became the Glen Eyrie was built for an
attorney after World War I. After it passed through a couple of
owners, Jim McCullough bought it in 1976. He and his family lived
upstairs and ran the restaurant downstairs, for decades growing the
fruit for their own sauces and jams, and making their own bread.
Like the miners at Mount Rushmore, the McCulloughs sank roots. They
made a commitment to each other, their families and their community
to build something lasting. Or so they hoped — but roots can
get paved over.
It’s healthy when communities
through their local historical societies identify the buildings
that hold the most value, and through county commissioners or
council members provide incentives to landowners to maintain those
old buildings. Not every building needs to be placed on the
National Register of Historic Places to be recognized as important,
and preservation achieved locally can be the most lasting.
Probably, it was time for the Glen Eyrie to go. A Payless
shoe store and its concrete parking lot had moved in close, making
the restaurant the odd ball on the highway. Its context was gone.
If Walgreens hadn’t snapped up the property, someone else
would have.
If we Westerners want to stay as Westerners,
we better develop ground level strategies to preserve what’s
unique about where we live before everything we’ve created
becomes expendable — just a “wipeaway” blocking the next new
thing.
Paul Zaenger is a contributor to Writers
on the Range, a service of High Country News
(hcn.org). He has been a park ranger at Black Canyon of the
Gunnison in western Colorado since 1993. His other assignments
include Death Valley National Park and Glen Canyon National
Recreation Area.
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