From the Archives: Rosalie Kelly Remembers – Walden

by Pat Walker, Research Assistant, Local History Archives

The Fort Collins Local History Archive has a large collection of Oral Histories taken in the early 1970s. Rosalie Kelley Remembers is a series of excerpts taken from an interview with Rosalie Kelly, a descendant of North Park pioneer families the Pinkhams and Allards, May 22, 1975.

Now I’m trying to think about different things that were interesting in Walden when I first went there. Well, I remember my first day of school. And – oh, it was an adventure to us. Guy and I had always played by ourselves. We didn’t have other kids to play with. And here were all these kids, there was eight grades and the four grades of high school in one little building. But oh, that seemed enormous to me. Now there are four, five, six buildings on that campus. That’s a regular little campus. But then, this was one school house. And a little girl that I didn’t know then, but have know all my life and she’s a life-long friend, came up and put her hands in mine – took ahold of mine and she said, “You’re a new little girl here, Rosalie. If you come out at recess with me, back behind the school house, I’ll tell you where babies come from.” (laughter) That was my memory of my first day at school. I said, “Well, you really don’t need to bother, because my mother’s already told me.” (laughter)

Another thing we enjoyed, and just had a ball when we first got there, was, if Mamma wasn’t along and Guy and I went over – we only lived about a block from Main Street – we’d run up and down those board sidewalks, so you’d hear them clatter, you know, and clang, but if she was around, there was no running on the board sidewalks.

There’s a little soda fountain in Dr. Fisher’s Pharmacy and we could go in there and for a nickel we could get and ice cream soda.

And we’d lived always on a ranch, you know, so my, that was something to get that ice cream soda.”

Walden School Classroom

Walden, Colorado August 4, 1903

The Snyder House Hotel, Walden, Colorado about 1910

From the Archive: Rosalie Kelly Remembers – The Railroad

by Pat Walker, Research Assistant, Fort Collins Local History Archive

The Fort Collins Local History Archive has a large collection of oral histories taken in the early 1970s. Rosalie Kelley Remembers is a series of excerpts taken from an interview with Rosalie Kelly, a descendant of North Park pioneer families the Pinkhams and Allards, May 22, 1975.

Rosalie Allard (later Kelly) in 1923

“I want to tell you a little bit about that early railroad because I have some memories there. My father and mother were great hands to take us to Denver and we’d go on the railroad as far as Laramie and then they’d get a sleeper, and that was a lot of fun. But you never knew when you were going to get to Denver, because the railroad might be stuck… the tracks weren’t good and for a long time they didn’t even have a rotary snow plow and we found ourselves one time in Harrison’s Cut, right out on the Laramie plains, two days and two nights, with a whole train load of people. And everybody that went on the railroad always took a great big lunch (laughter), thinking, “Well, we might get stuck,” and we usually were. But this time I remember, it seemed so long and we got so bored… and I looked out the window and here came my dad and another man (they had borrowed from the train crew… snow shoes and gone down–up–up the hill to a little town called Albany) and… each one had a gunny sack over their shoulder, and I know the first thing dad took out of that gunny sack and gave to us was an orange apiece. And that was a real hey day.”

Colorado & Southern passenger train No. 9, snowbound near Como, Colorado. Photographed by Otto Westerman in 1904.