Four Mile House is the oldest standing structure in the city of Denver, Colorado!
The oldest portion of the house was built in 1859, and the location served as the last stagecoach stop before entering what was then the "Colorado Gold Rush" city of Denver, on the Wells Fargo Butterfield Stagecoach route between El Paso and Denver.
Routes from the plains towards the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
The Colorado Gold Rush, originally known as the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, started in 1858 and was the second largest mining excitement in United States history after the great California Gold Rush a decade earlier. Over 100,000 people participated in this rush and were known as “Fifty-Niners”, a reference to 1859, the year the rush to Colorado peaked.
“Pikes Peak or Bust” was the motto of many emigrants, a reference to the mountain in the Front Range that guided many early prospectors westward over the Great Plains.
Gold Rush Prospectors
Gold prospectors were the first major non-native population to enter the region, leading to the creation of many early towns, including Denver, Boulder, Golden, and numerous smaller mining towns, some of which are still active communities today.
As prospectors flooded the region in search of quick riches, the rapid population growth led to the creation of the Colorado Territory in 1861 and to the U.S. State of Colorado in 1876.
Four Mile House was built in late summer or fall 1859 by the brothers Samuel and Jonas Brantner. In 1858, Jonas had come to Colorado from Ohio to look for gold. After prospecting unsuccessfully on Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, he gave up and staked a farming claim along Cherry Creek.
In August 1859, Jonas’s brother Samuel arrived in Colorado, and they soon built a two-story log house on Jonas’s land. Samuel, his wife, and their infant daughter occupied the house in October 1859.
The house might have acquired the name “Four Mile House” in 1859 or 1860, when part of the Cherokee Trail began to be used by mail carriers traveling between Colorado City (now part of Colorado Springs) and Denver as well as by immigrants following the Smoky Hill Trail from Kansas to Denver. It was four miles from the house to Broadway in the city of Denver.
In 1860, the Brantners sold Four Mile House to Mary Cawker. A widow from Wisconsin, Cawker moved into the house with her two children that September. She operated it as a stage station with a bar downstairs and a tavern, and held dances on the second floor.
Over the next decade, stages regularly stopped at the house to change horses and to allow passengers to change clothes and freshen up before they arrived in Denver after their 700-mile, 12-week journey across the midwestern and high desert plains.
Mary Cawker sold the house to Levi Booth for $800. An attorney originally from Wisconsin, Booth moved into the house with his family in August 1864. He continued to operate the house as a stage stop and tavern for the rest of the decade.
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Over the years, the current U-shaped plan evolved as three buildings were butted together to accommodate changing needs. Together, the 1859 squared log construction, the circa 1860s woodframe construction, and the 1883 brick portions reflect the evolution of rural housing during the Denver area’s early settlement period.
Glendale neighborhood of Denver in the distance of the Four Mile House grounds.
In 1946, the Booth family sold Four Mile House to Glen Boulton, who stayed there for nearly thirty years. During those years, the house, previously on the edge of the city, was surrounded by development as Denver spread southeast and Glendale became an enclave of businesses and bars. In response to encroaching development, preservationists worked to ensure Four Mile House’s survival. In 1968, the house became a Denver landmark, and in 1969, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1977, the nonprofit Four Mile Historic Park Inc. was formed to care for the property, which was opened to the public the next year as a living history museum.
One of the members of our friends group had volunteered as a tour guide for many years at Four Mile Park, and she decided to plan an outing for us to take a self-guided tour of the park and house, and then have lunch afterwards at a local restaurant.
Click on the collage to enlarge it.
We enjoyed looking at all the interesting history exhibits about Four Mile House in its Visitor Center...
...and then strolling the grounds to see how the land had been developed as a farm in the late 1800s, which included a school house...
... and a blacksmith shop, a summer kitchen, and a barn housing 1800s era transportation vehicles.
We had a guided tour of the inside of Four Mile House with a volunteer who told us more of its history.
Four Mile Historic Park is a great resource for educators and students to learn about Colorado’s early history and hosts many events for all ages during the year.
If you are a history enthusiast, and would like to learn more about Four Mile House there is an interesting PBS Experience show about it on YouTube with fascinating vintage photos of the covered wagons and stagecoach rides--see video above.
We we all so glad to see that Four Mile House was preserved and is now a wonderful view back into the pioneer days of our nation's history.
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