Montrose - Daily Press

Marilyn Cox

A Step Back In Time

How many of you make scrapbooks? It’s become a popular hobby where people take classes, use colorful paper, stickers, cut-outs and acid free sleeves. My late sister, Geraldine Ray, followed in our mother’s and grandmother’s footsteps, keeping all kinds of newspaper articles, jokes, pictures and photographs, pasting them in bound scrapbooks. Some even used old ledgers and any kind of book they could get their hands on, gluing their treasures on the used pages. One of my favorites of my mother’s was formerly a teacher’s plan book.

Advertisement

Recently I’ve been reading through one of Geraldine’s scrapbooks where she saved many newspaper photos that were submitted by the late Lawrence and Winona Viers, Olathe historians and authors of the book “Bits and Pieces of Olathe History.” Winona’s father was “Tater Bill Smith,” an early-day photographer in the town, who left them a wonderful collection of historic photographs.

When fall rolls around, some of us remember the sugar beet harvest. One of the pictures in Geraldine’s book, shows a line of teams of horses pulling large farm wagons laden with sugar beets. The photo, taken in 1908, was shot at the west end of Main Street. The sugar beet dump was north of Main, near the railroad tracks, making the line three blocks long. In Vier’s caption, he wrote, “Nobody got in a hurry in those days. Note the empty wagon seats and the drivers gathered under the shade tree enjoying themselves.”

Of course, the wagons were replaced over the years by farm trucks. Sugar beets were raised in the Uncompahgre Valley until 1976 when Holly Sugar Company closed their factory in Delta, a huge blow to the local economy. My husband remembers making a little cash in the late 1940s, early ’50s, from the farmers whose trucks were waiting in line. They paid local kids to sit in the trucks and drive them forward at a snail’s pace, while they gathered at the local “watering hole” in downtown Olathe.

With our early freeze, I am wondering if we might have a harder winter than we’ve had the past few years. One of the photos in the book looks back to the year 1919, “the year of THE BIG SNOW”. It shows Eleanor Casner standing in front of her home on Sixth Street and Corey Avenue. Viers wrote, “On Thanksgiving morning, Olathe people awoke to find three feet of snow covering the ground. Many plans for Thanksgiving dinners had to be canceled that year because horses and buggies could not flounder through the drifts of snow.”

One of the pictures was courtesy of the Olathe Co-op, taken in 1915, probably by photographer, Wilbur Mossman. It shows one of the busiest places in town during harvest season, warehouses on Fifth Street. In 1910, two brothers, Ed and Adolph (Ott) DeGuelle, built one of the large brick warehouses. Ott sold his interest in their produce company to Ed around 1915. B. A. Casner had a warehouse across the street from DeGuelles. It burned down in 1945 or ’46 when it was owned by the Co-op and was replaced with one of the current warehouses.

A photo, taken around 1910 or ’12 shows the Rio Grande Depot with the train standing at the station. A group of passengers were gathering their belongings. Viers wrote, “These people were Germans who had first migrated to Russia, and then fled to the United States… They were all excellent farmers and came to Olathe to get a start in their new homeland.”

Also shown in this photo was a stack of large bags of wool on the depot platform. Viers said, “no doubt they were being shipped by H. E. Perkins, who had the largest wool business in the Olathe vicinity.”

Another picture is of the photographer Mossman, standing on a pile of dirt in the middle of one of Olathe’s streets. Viers wrote that Mossman came to Olathe in 1910 and established a photography studio, serving the community until the mid-1940’s when he retired. Mossman took my baby photo when I was around six months old, sitting in an antique chair. I have a picture of our son, Doug, taken in the same chair by Dale Felix, when he operated the studio in the 1950s.

Aren’t scrapbooks great?

Comments