The Grass/Land - How We Found Our Place

 

Above is an aerial photo of the farm that was taken before we bought it.  The realtor gave it to us.

 

 



How We Found Our Place

Someone recently asked how we came to be living in this remote place.  It is a good story and I have decided to tell it here.

About ten years ago, we were longing for a place to get out of the city and away from civilization for weekends and holidays.  We did a lot of hiking and camping and canoeing on public lands, but it had long been a dream to have a place of our own.  We began taking weekends to look for our refuge.  We looked in the mountains and we looked on the prairie.  The prairie captivated us, because it reminded us of the  mid-west in some ways, and because it was realtively unpeopled, and the traffic coming and going on weekends was not so terrible.   We saw an ad in the Denver newspaper for open plots of land, some large, some small, and some with primitive cabins on a large ranch that was being subdivided in Huerfano County in southeastern Colorado.  We went to look.  It was the weekend of our wedding anniversary and the solstice.  We fell in love with a parcel and asked if we could camp out on it before making a final decision.  The next morning we closed the deal.  The story of this place is being told at http://www.apishipawash.blogspot.com .  I mention it here because it was a catalist for our move to the farm as well.

Because it became our aim to build a home and eventually retire on our new land, and because all that open range just begged to be explored on horseback, we bought a couple of horses, boarded them, and began to ride.  For me it was a re-learning process.  For my husband it was a new endeavor.  This was better started in our fifties than in our sixties, we reckoned.  As the years passed, boarding the horses became more and more expensive and as I relearned/remembered what I had known about horse care, the standard of care offered at the places we could afford seemed less and less adequate.  So one day my husband said, "These boarding fees are like a second mortgage.  What would you say to looking for a horse property, bringing them home, and paying ourselves the mortgage payment?"   I was thrilled with the idea and ready to retire from my full-time teaching job anyway.  So we determined to look for a place, thinking it would take months, perhaps years, to find the right one. 

We contacted a realtor in Elbert County, because that was far enough from Denver that we might be able to afford property there.  He gave us a stack of listings to drive around and look at, with the idea that we would ask for a showing of anything we liked.   It was a rainy October Saturday morning when we started out on our search.  We drove for miles, and hours on muddy paved roads and even muddier dirt ones.  We saw many, many pieces of bare land with double wides or other temporary housing, loafing sheds and round pens.  There were a couple that had real barns, and outdoor arenas, but all seemed minimal and a little sad.  It was around three oclock in the afternoon.  We had not had any lunch.  My husband was getting that grey-around-the-gills look that he gets when his blood sugar is low.  It was raining hard now. We had been on this one dirt road for quite a while, Elbert County 17/21, and we came to a crossroads.  It was foggy.  We could not see any mountains and we were not sure which direction we were going.   He said, "I can't do this anymore.  It's too depressing."  I started to turn the car around in the intersection.  He looked up the hill to the west and said, "Now if we could find a place that looked like that, I be all over it in a heart beat!"  I looked in the direction of his gaze.  There, on top of the hill, was a little white house and a big red barn. 

It looked like a Minnesota farmstead, like the ones his grandparents and great aunts and uncles had lived on and worked, around Walnut Grove.  There was a grove, and a couple of other buildings, and that signature red barn.  "It looks empty." I said, "Let's drive up there and see."  It was empty, and down in the tall grass there was a little hand painted For Sale sign.  We hopped over the fence and looked around.  We peeked in the windows of the house and looked in the barn and sheds.  It was old and run down and had definitely seen better days, but it had real possibilities.  This was before we had cell phones, so we hopped back in the car, took down the phone number on the sign, and headed back to Denver, stopping only for gas and  hot dogs at the Franktown service station.  

When we got home, my husband called the number from the sign.  It was a realtor in the town of Elbert.  She said the place was sold, it was under contract and the closing was the following Thursday.  He asked that she keep our number in case anything went wrong at the closing. 

And something did go wrong at the closing.  They had to relist it for 48 hours.  During that time, we got a proper showing and made an offer that was a few dollars over the asking price.  The place was bank owned and priced as if it were bare land.  The bank that owned it was in Kansas and they figured from the photographs that whoever bought it would scrape the buildings and start over.  They hadn't met us!

 

 

When we went back for the showing it was a sunny day and we realized that it had this amazing three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of Pike's Peak, and the Bijou.   The whole thing seemed like it was meant to be.