On March 28, 2023, residents of County Road 301 spoke before the La Plata County Board of County Commissioners to lament the condition of the gravel byway.
It wasn’t the first time that county residents had raised the issue of road conditions – not by any means.
Nearly 140 years earlier, on Jan. 6, 1885, county resident H.H. Brown and more than 25 other people lodged a complaint with the BOCC, “charging that the Durango Parrott City and Fort Lewis Toll Road Company were and are neglecting and refusing to keep their sad road in proper repair and conditions and more particularly at that point in its said road known as the slough situated about seven miles from Durango in said road where a small stream crosses a mine place in said road.”
The board examined the privately owned road and found the allegations to be true. That’s no surprise, said Susan Jones, collections manager of the Animas Museum. Otto Mears, the developer who built highways throughout Southwest Colorado as Ute tribes were pushed off the land, had a reputation.
“He was kind of notorious for building and then leaving and not taking care, not worrying about maintenance,” Jones said.
In this series
This month, The Durango Herald is taking readers back in time through the lens of La Plata County government archives. The documents offer a look at what county residents cared about, how they lived and died, and the political landscape over a period of time, stretching from the mid-1880s through the 1930s.
The series appears each Sunday over four weeks: Aug. 4, Aug. 11, Aug. 18 and Aug. 25.
In response, the BOCC required the toll road company fix the road within five days. If it didn’t, users could not be charged a toll and “the said Board will take possession of the same (road) in the name of and for the use of the said County.”
According to records logged in a plain, white canvas-bound book, now kept in the custody of County Clerk and Recorder Tiffany Lee, the work of the Board of County Commissioners in 1884 rings familiar to the board members today.
“It’s very similar in nature,” said Board Chair Matt Salka. “We’re still dealing with the same type of scenarios, even today in 2024.”
Roads were the primary matter of concern. Meeting records show the board regularly considered road repairs, regulating tolls, entertained petitions to build new roads and occasionally created new road districts.
“In La Plata County, as in other counties on the Western Slope, the most important element in the 19th century was access, public access to farms, ranches (and) mines,” said Andrew Gulliford, a professor of history and environmental studies at Fort Lewis College and an expert on history of the American west.
Today, those roads are necessary for commerce and tourism, Commissioner Marsha Porter-Norton pointed out.
In both the late 19th Century and 2024, some people did not want the roads near their homes improved. Some residents today don’t want tourists accessing rural parts of the county; some residents in 1885 wanted to sneak their sheep up into the high country to graze earlier than allowed, Gulliford said.
Porter-Norton questions some of the transparency, or lack thereof, in the 1885 records. A bill from W. Wakefield issued to the county for services as an election judge for the sum of $2.50 was first denied on April 11, 1885, and then reconsidered and allowed on July 25.
“If we had something like this in our minutes, people would wonder,” she said.
Although the rules and regulations that commissioners must follow to serve the increasingly complex demands of a growing public constituency have changed, archived BOCC records indicate continuity in the public’s core demands of a government.
“The job, of course, evolves and changes, but that serving as a local official is somewhat timeless,” Porter-Norton said.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
