This opinion piece reflects the views of John Hazlehurst only and are not endorsed by the Pikes Peak Bulletin.
Decades ago, the Gazette prominently featured the Society Column, a weekly tribute to the parties and gatherings of our city’s leading citizens. If you aspired to become one of the chosen few, there were lots of avenues to follow, create or scam your way to fame, fortune or genteel notoriety.
It’s interesting to compare today’s growth-obsessed, exorbitantly wealthy middle-aged white guys with their 19th and early 20th century counterparts. Amateur historians and ancient Colorado Springs residents (I qualify in both categories) tend to believe that the latter era was graced by dignity, taste and consensual creation of a remarkable little city. I remember it well – but history, as revealed in by letters from prominent and not-so-prominent residents sealed in the Century Chest of 1901, reveals a city much like ours, if much smaller.
People then were just as quarrelsome, argumentative and opinionated as we are now. The Chest was opened a century later, and historian Judith Reid Finley published many of them that year.
A question for readers: what’s your favorite historic structure in downtown Colorado Springs? Most of us would choose the 1902 El Paso County Courthouse, now the Pioneers’ Museum. Yet the architect Thomas MacLaren, who would design many of our city’s great buildings (including the City Auditorium), was not a fan.
“In style it is very ordinary Italian Renaissance,” he wrote in 1901 in the Century Chest, “and we fear posterity will not give it a high place amongst architectural works … what the building will ultimately be no one can foretell, controlled as it is by politicians who know nothing of and care less for things beautiful.” Politicians or not, we love the building, the museum and its contents.
Like politicians in every era, elected officials were chiefly focused on budgetary issues. Noting that the smallpox epidemic had cost the city $5,000 (about $250,000 now), Mayor John Robinson presciently predicted that “the advances made in medical sciences the past century gives basis for the belief that smallpox and other contagious diseases will in your age no longer trouble civilized peoples.”
It seems weird that the paper will outlive us all and bear witness that we have lived. – Harriet Peck Farnsworth
Then 24, unmarried, highly intelligent and extraordinarily beautiful, Leah Lucile Ehrich was the most gifted author of any of the Century Chest’s contributors, as well as a talented musician and music coach. After her marriage in 1903, she lived in Europe, Princeton and New York City. When and where did she die? Couldn’t find out, alas – but she sure could write!
“As I write I find myself wondering if you also use a pen – if your spelling is the same miserable unphonetic one and if your heart tingles with the thought of we who are dust as mine does with the thought of you who are as yet nonexistent…we believe and hope that you of the year 2001 will have a great orchestra, comparing favorably with the Boston Symphony Orchestra – at present the most perfect organization of its kind in America.”
Leah, we sure do! I’ll think of you at the next concert …
And lastly, a very personal story. My great-grandmother, Harriet Peck Farnsworth, wrote a letter to her great-grandchildren that she put in the Century Chest. I vividly remember the day that Judy Finley called me to ask whether I was related to Harriet.
“You need to come read this,” she said. I did, and wept.
“Dear Great grandchildren,” she wrote, “It seems rather a ghostly thing to do – this writing to generations yet unborn. Even my dear grandchildren will not be living when this letter is opened and read … It seems weird that the paper will outlive us all and bear witness that we have lived. When I was a girl in old Connecticut, I little thought that I should spend the latter years of my life in this Great West … This town [Colorado Springs] is busy in its social life, in its business life as well – the rich mines of Cripple Creek giving out their golden treasure to some, withholding from others. Withal there is a very sad undercurrent, which must come to the surface at times, and the voice of pleasure is hushed for a little, but hearts are full of sympathy and kindness and I feel that your hearts will be as sympathetic and your hands as helpful.”
She enclosed pictures of my mother (then three) and her sister (five). Born in 1844, she died here in 1916 after a full and interesting life.
A last glance: “… I met Lincoln one quiet morning (if any morning could be called quiet in those days), the second year of the war. That he bore the sorrows and burdens of a great nation showed in every line of his face, though it was lighted now and then by a glint of humour.”
And that’s how to remember all of those who contributed to the Century Chest – they may seem somber and reflective, but let’s hope they also had fun, fun, fun … and let’s make sure we have plenty of fun, too, before we join the ranks of “we who are dust” and leave the earth for those “yet nonexistent.”
