Sunday, November 15, 2026

The Old Fred Rowley Homestead Ranch in Snow Mountain Ranch

So sorry that I have been absent from my blog for a few weeks, as we were traveling for reasons both happy and sad, and then I had to catch up on life at home... I'm now continuing on with our late September visit to the YMCA of the Rockies at Snow Mountain Ranch. 

On the last day of our stay at the ranch we woke up to misty clouds forming over the mountains and the possibility of rain.  After breakfast, we decided to take a drive to explore more of the Snow Mountain Ranch property, and we visited two old abandoned ranches that have been preserved by the YMCA as vestiges of the past.


The first ranch we visited was the Fred Rowley Ranch, established 1919 to 1954.

The Rowleys were a couple who moved from Denver to claim land under the Homestead Act of 1862.


My husband standing on the ranch house porch. 

Fred Rowley lived on the Rowley Homestead beginning in 1919 with his wife Martha and their three children. As you can imagine, homesteading in the high-country of Colorado was not easy. At first, Fred built the barn to shelter the animals while the family lived in a tent. Fred built this large cabin in 1920.



 Please click on photo to read 

As you can read on the placard above, Martha did not enjoy the isolation of the ranch. She left Fred, and moved back to Denver, never to return to the ranch. Life was hard for ranching pioneers, perhaps hardest of all for the women, for they worked in the fields and did all the work of the house as well, and much of the garden work. Martha  allowed her children to return to the ranch each summer, but I read that she never returned.


The ranch house front porch had a swing, facing this lovely view in the distance.


The loggers cabin was moved to the homestead in the 1980s from a nearby location by YMCA of the Rockies to preserve it. The porch was added at that time as the cabin is now used as a storage area for the Homestead staff. It is the only building not original to the Rowley Homestead. The cabin was was built in the 1940s. Its simple design and construction suggest that it was not meant to be a permanent structure. Up to 5 loggers might have sheltered in this cabin during their 6 to 8-week stints logging in the forests.


The original Rowley Barn. It is the first structure that Fred built in 1919.
Eventually, Fred Rowley constructed more and larger barns for his livestock and turned this building into a workshop. Today, the original barn is set up as a workshop and features a small forge, a kerosene engine, and a corn sheller—all common farm implements for early twentieth century homesteaders.
 

Some old wagons on dispaly at the ranch property, and a curious deer peeking at us through the fence.


Fred kept dairy cows in this barn, but it is not known the exact number of cattle that Fred raised. Fred probably could not sustain a large herd at the ranch as he lacked the water rights to the land. This meant that he could not divert Pole Creek (which is located down the hill from the Rowley Homestead) to water his crops or his animals. He also could not use the creek to irrigate his land or dig a well.
The other ranch family in the area, the Just family, owned the water rights to Pole Creek. They allowed Fred to have “bucket rights” to the water, meaning that he could pull water out in buckets and use it on his homestead.

Fred Rowley struggled every day to make ends meet, but without water rights he was never successful. In 1939 he fell behind on his taxes and sold his property to Della Just. She allowed him to stay as a tenant farmer until he left between 1953-1954. He died in 1957.


The home's outhouse (upper left in the photo collage above) was far from the house and in winter Fred tied a rope from the outhouse door to the ranch house door so that it could be used to guide them at night and in snowstorms. 

The ranch house had no running water or electricity, so it was very important to store food for the long snowy winters.  Rowley had a root celler storage area that kept provisions at a steady underground temperature between 32 and 40 degrees fahrenheit, both in winter and summer.   The root celler was recntly refurbished through donations.


A larger photo of the root celler information placard, that also has a photo of Fred Rowley on it.
The Rowley Homestead is a interesting place to visit to learn about the hard lives that Western homesteaders faced after the American Civil War era.



One of the donors of the Rowley Ranch left these wise words on a plaque on a nearby boulder: 
"The only thing you can take with you is that which you have given away in your lifetime."
--John Templeton


Some close ups of the beautiful fall aspen leaves around the ranch.

On my next post I'll show another even older ranch property that is on the Snow Mountain Ranch property-- which is the Just Ranch, established in 1893 on 320 acres. Over the years the Justs expanded their land to over 3,000 acres. The YMCA purchased the land from Della Just in 1965. and created the Snow Mountain Ranch of today!

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