DRIVE-THRU / CURBSIDE PICKUP

Passwords are now required to access your account. To create a password, select "Reset my Password" from the Login screen (email address required). For further assistance, please visit the Library Account Passwords FAQ page for instructions or call the library at 970-243-4442.

The Central Library will be closed March 31 for Easter Sunday. View all holiday closures.


Showing 1 - 20 of 32 , query time: 0.02s
Cover Image
Format:
Pdf
In the May-June 2023 newsletter of the Mesa County Historical Society, Ruth G. Moss discusses early sheriffs in Mesa County and early marshals in Grand Junction. She talks about jail breaks, cattle rustling, shootings on the range, prostitution, vice, and the murder of popular gambling parlor owner J.W. “Big Kid” Eames.
Cover Image
Format:
Compound
Fritz Becker, a former officer in the Grand Junction Police Department, discusses crime in Grand Junction, including: murders, the clean-up of prostitution and vice on Colorado Avenue, gambling houses and bootlegging. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and the Museums of Western Colorado.
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
Glenn McFall talks about early doctors in Grand Junction, Colorado and their treatment of patients, including the story of Dr. Everett Munro removing McFall's son's tonsils on the dining room table, and Munro performing an emergency appendectomy at a home in Unaweep Canyon. He also discusses the Strawberry Days Glenwood Springs to Grand Junction bicycle race, old Western Slope hotels, the rigors of early interstate automobile travel, competing in...
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
Glenn W. McFall relates a tale of riding the rails during the Depression as a teenager and getting food and help from a prostitute in Salida, Colorado. He also talks in general about prostitution in Grand Junction and the American West. He discusses the Land's End Hill Climb auto race, prominent physicians and businessmen of early Grand Junction, the shoe trade, button shoes and women's fashion. He then talks about Chipeta's visits to the McConnell-Lowes...
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
Eugene Perry talks about his childhood in Grand Junction’s Riverside neighborhood. He speaks about working for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad from the time he was thirteen years old, his career building track as a section foreman, and the history of D&RG in Grand Junction. He discusses landmarks such as Bowman’s slaughterhouse, the Pest House, and the town’s ice houses. He reminisces about a youth curfew that was in place in Grand Junction...
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
Ernest "Dude" Todd discusses some of his experiences as a Routt County law enforcement officer and city manager for the city of Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
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 Glimpses of Old Grand...
Cover Image
Format:
Person
She was a prostitute on Grand Junction's Colorado Avenue that worked for the madam Jenny Ward. She was killed by Cecil McHolland.
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
Al Look discusses his 40-year employment with the Daily Sentinel, including his relationships with publishers Walter Walker and Preston Walker and the lives of the two men. He also discusses the Typographical Union Strike of 1946 and the hardships it caused between the union and the Sentinel. Al also talks about his and Walter Walker’s relationship with the Ku Klux Klan, Walker’s tolerance of the brothels on South Avenue, and Walker’s rivalry...
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
Bill Callahan, Creston Bailey, and James Shaw discuss the history of early Twentieth century Grand Junction. The three men talk about their fathers: Thomas F. Callahan, the owner of Callahan’s Mortuary (now Callahan-Edfast); Dwight B. Bailey, the owner of the D.B. Bailey grocery store; and James Scott Shaw, a rancher, miner, and owner of the Midland Garage. They talk about Main Street businesses, including Sampliner’s. They remember the wagons...
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
Interview with George Koenig, born July 13, 1919 and died June 8, 2007. George did one of everything! He discusses his service in the U.S. Navy, owning a business in Salida, being a member of the Elks, Masons, Shriners, and the American Legion Drum and Bugle Corps. George was also a state highway commissioner, was on the board of HRRMC and the Chamber of Commerce, was the first president of the South Arkansas Fire Protection District and as one of...
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
In a recording made for his son, Don Rogers talks about his family’s cattle ranch on Pinon Mesa in the 1910’s, about getting lost in the wilderness at the age of six, about an expert tracker named Avery Burford who led the search party, and about being found the next morning after he spent the night alone on a sandbar of East Creek. He recalls a gunfight between cowboys Louis Stewart and Blue, a shooting by a man named Pete Lapham, and tensions...
Cover Image
Format:
Compound
Mary Cox talks about her education at the Bryant School and elsewhere in Grand Junction, about corsets and other aspects of school fashion, the history of the Riverside Neighborhood, attending community dances and Glenwood Springs’ Strawberry Days, and boys swimming in the Colorado River. She also discusses old downtown businesses, going to movies at the Majestic Theater, a brothel that advertised at the Mesa County Fairgrounds during a baseball...
Cover Image
Format:
Person
According to Mesa County Oral History Project interviewee Mary Plaisted, Fran was the madam of a higher end brothel in a nice part of town (nicer than Grand Junction’s red-light district in any case). She also owned a double decker horse-drawn carriage in which beautifully dressed prostitutes rode. The carriage and its occupants probably served as advertising for the brothel. It may also be the same carriage that Mary Agnes (Robinson) Cox refers...
Cover Image
Format:
Image
Real estate appraisal card. 130 W. Sackett Avenue, pt. SE 1/4, Sec. 32 T 50N R 9E, in Salida, Colorado. This building was constructed about 1906. The 1909 and 1914 Sanborn maps show this building divided into six units and labeled "female boarding," a Sanborn Map Company euphemism for a place of prostitution. This building is visible on 1926 and late 1930s overview photographs of Salida taken from Tenderfoot Hill. These "cribs" were operated by...
Cover Image
Format:
Image
Real estate appraisal card. 117 W. Sackett Ave., lots % & 6, block 5, in Salida, Colorado. This building is not shown on the 1888 Sanborn map, but does appear on the 1890 map, when it is indicated as a Chinese laundry and female boarding on the second story, connected by a passage on the first story to a female boarding house or bordello at 113 W. Sackett Ave. This block of West Sackett Avenue was Salida's Red Light district, and contained several...
Cover Image
Format:
Person
A Basque immigrant who came to Mesa County in 1925. Along with other Basque immigrants, he was a sheepherder in the Pinon Mesa and Green River, Utah areas. After approximately five years of herding sheep, he and other Basques pooled their money and purchased a sheep ranching outfit, which they did in the middle of the Great Depression. In 1935, he purchased the LaSalle Hotel on Grand Junction’s Colorado Avenue, and helped decrease prostitution and...
Cover Image
Format:
Voice Recording
A KOTO Radio show, called Friday Live, that aired on March 2, 1978, in Telluride, Colorado. Jerry Greene interviews Bill (William) Hamner. At the time of this recording, Bill was 72 years old. He moved to Telluride to retire and purchased the Old Senate Saloon to live in, along with his wife. His wife died of smoking, shortly after the move. Bill speaks of his background (born in Kansas and then moved to Wyoming to live on a cattle ranch with his...
Cover Image
Format:
Person
Glen McFall was born in Nebraska to Elmer McFall, a rancher, and Clara (Jordan) McFall, a school teacher and homemaker. He attended grade school in Nebraska and then moved to Clifton, Colorado at the age of six, after Clara McFall separated from Elmer. He attended eighth grade at the Clifton School, and then bicycled to school at Grand Junction High School until his family moved into town. In his youth, he worked in Clfiton's Hornbecker Store, measuring...
Cover Image
Format:
Person
He grew up in Nebraska and Grand Junction, Colorado. He attended Grand Junction High School and then Colorado College, but had to quit due to his father's death. His brother Charles worked for the Department of the Interior, and got him a job as a cowboy for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and as a U.S. Deputy Stock detective on the Crow Reservation in Montana. During this time, he worked with a doctor on the reservation to complete his studies at Colorado...