The History of Lamar, Colorado BY sashays History Of Lamar, Colorado In 1886 1. R. Holmes created a land company with Colonel A. S. Johnson and J. E. Gooding, with associates Captain Daniel E. Cooper, M. D. Parameter, M. L. Swift, Captain Chivvy, and Holmes’ brother J. H. Holmes. I. R. Holmes was an experienced land promoter who headed the Garden City – Lamar contingent. He wanted to create a new land office site in the Bent County area. Holmes eventually found a site in the southeast quarter of section 31, township 22, range 46.
It was located between John Prowess range and the A. R. Black ranch. This site was almost perfect, it was on the Arkansas River and the Santa Fee Railroad line. The only problem with this site was it was about four miles from the Blackwell Station. Black would not sell his land for a new town to be made, nor allow the station to be moved off the ranch. This created a problem that had to be dealt with because the Santa Fee Railroad line would never let two land offices be so close to each other.
On May 22, 1886 Black received a telegram wanting him to go to Pueblo to deal with the problem. Later that day he took a train up to Pueblo. That night, after he was gone, a work train from La Junta pulled by Engine No. 345 pulled into Blackwell station. Men got out of the train with tools and went to work on the station. The men loaded the station, along with all of the necessary out buildings, onto flat cars. They took so many buildings that men had to walk beside the train to help balance it all the way back to the new site.
This heist was done on a Sunday for legal reasons. On Sundays a court order could not be filed to prevent the move. Also, on a Sunday the sheriff could not interfere with the move. Marion Simenon Davidson recalled that the same station had been stolen a few times afore to start new towns but it was always retrieved and taken back to Blackwell. This time, however, the men did such a good Job the station stayed where it had been moved to. Holmes named this new site after L. Q. C. Lamar. Lamar was the Secretary of the Interior in President Grover Cleveland cabinet.
He was a Confederate Calvary officer and had worked to reunite the North and South when he served several terms as a senator from Mississippi. He also used his political and personal influence to support the extension of the railroad lines across the Mid-Western states. Holmes naming the new town after such a person was a huge incentive for people to move their. Even with the name, however, the first weeks in Lamar were not comfortable. The food was scarce and sometimes people would take the train to La Junta Just to get something to eat. On May 24, 1886 that all changed.
At 10 a. M. A special train from Garden City pulled up to the station full of supplies, home seekers, and speculators. By 5 p. M. Later that day $42,000 in lots had been sold. By the end of that week half a dozen restaurants, real estate offices, and saloons were opened and thin eight weeks a hundred residences were counted. Until Lamar had its own post office the U. S. Mail came from the Blackwell post office. On August 14, 1886 the first piece mail was received and Lama’s new post office was opened. By December 1886 schools, stores, a church and a newspaper were open.
With new business and civilization in Eastern Colorado there finally had to be laws. The first ordinance was the adoption of the city seal – “Town of Lamar, Bent County, Colorado”. The second ordinance outlawed quarrelling, fighting, or even inviting another party to do so. These laws had to be made to keep order within the new town, with out them the town might not have survived. In an article from John A. Murphy’s Lass Manias Leader it stated, “The Main Street of Lamar runs north and south across the railroad track and has a gentle decline that assures good drainage.
The largest part of the building is done on this street, and about thirty store rooms are either completed of nearly so. ” Some of the buildings that were built back then are still standing today, such as the stone building on the corner of Main Street and Poplar Street. This building use o be the Davies Hotel, which was then changed to the Kelsey Hotel, and then the Payne Hotel. Even tough this building is no longer being used today, it is still a part of the towns’ history.
On April 11, 1889 Bent County was broken up into several different counties creating Prowess County, along with several others, but this also created a much smaller Bent County. After this the southeast corner of Colorado was called Prowess County. This caused Lamar to be changed from Bent to Prowess County. One of the natural disasters that hit Lamar was the Dust Bowl in the sass’s, commonly known as the Dirty Thirties. Most of topsoil was blown off empty fields and carried in storm clouds for hundreds of miles.
By the time the storms were over it had effected the whole country. During the flood of 1965, from June 14th to June 18th, a storm with several cloudbursts hit most of Eastern Colorado. Approximately 20 people died and about $600 million damage was done. Only two people died when a dam broke in Prowess County which caused $18 million in damage at Holly, Granddad and Lamar . Lama’s history does not stop here though, there has been many more expansions, laws, and crimes that have shaped Lamar into what it is today.
