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Bunk Weimer recalls settling on land at the current location of Colorado Mesa University as a child in 1903, where the boys slept in a cave and the rest of the family in tents before the land was leveled for farming. He talks about helping with the construction of the first Mesa County Fairgrounds (on the site of the present day Lincoln Park), including the Lincoln Park Barn. He discusses helping his father pour foundations for several prominent buildings...
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Thelma Moore talks about her youth on a fruit farm in Pear Park, life in early Grand Junction, her involvement in 4-H clubs, the Locust Ranch fruit growing operation in Clifton, and the other members of the Kettle family to settle in that area. She discusses her career as a seamstress and work making drapes, county extension work with quilters, craft competitions at the Mesa County Fair, and chautauquas and variety shows. She also goes into her life...
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Mary Plaisted talks about growing up in the Milldale area around the sugar beet factory in Grand Junction, Colorado, and about the brothels and red-light district nearby. She describes having to beg and take odd cleaning and sewing jobs to support she and her children, and the kind strangers that helped her. She mentions the many places she lived in Grand Junction, the floods common in the Riverside neighborhood, and living in a close-knit Italian...
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Rose and Morgan Goss discuss the early settlement of Grand Junction and Fruita, Colorado, and agricultural life in the Appleton area. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and the Museums of Western Colorado.
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To mark the centennial celebration of the town of Grand Junction, Colorado in 1981, the Mesa County Oral History Project wrote and recorded several radio plays about local history. Beginning on September 26, 1981, local radio stations KSTR, KREX-AM, KREX-FM, and KMSA broadcast the plays. Authors of the plays used interviews recorded by the Mesa County Oral History Project as inspiration. This archival recording contains the play A Natural Resource:...
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Ray Boggs talks about his family’s move to Colorado and about attending the University of Colorado at Boulder. He remembers playing on a baseball team for the Midwest Oil Company and briefly as a professional pitcher for the Boston Braves. He describes pitching methods. He recalls working for the International Harvester company, a farm implement dealer, and how the company brought him to Grand Junction, where he became the manager of the store there...
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Ann Stokes talks about homesteading on East Orchard Mesa after her family moved to Mesa County, Colorado in 1904. She remembers her father working on the “fancy” masonry for the Grand Junction train station. She recalls living in a one-room log cabin and sharing that cabin with a horse for an evening. She speaks about the development of irrigation on East Orchard Mesa and her father’s peach orchard. She describes walking with her siblings four...
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Dick Williams talks about the games he played with children as a boy in the downtown area of Grand Junction, including hide and go seek and kick the can. He remembers playing sandlot baseball and other games in a vacant lot on 9th Street between Grand and White Avenues. He recalls swimming in ditches and canals, and ice skating in what is now Lincoln Park. He speaks about competing in athletics in high school and college, and in Pioneer Clubs, which...
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James Earl Shaw and Creston Ralph Bailey talk about the history of their families in Mesa County, and discuss their families’ roles in the automobile and grocery businesses respectively. They mention people and places important to Grand Junction. They also reminisce about their experiences at the Presbyterian church camp on the Grand Mesa, and all the antics they pulled while growing up. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History...