Introduction
The following photo galleries--Pioneer Days, Resort Days, and Eldorado
Springs Today--provide a visual journey to the Eldorado Springs past,
and document the modern homes. These low resolution images were scanned
from the slide collections of Tony Delany and Judy Feland, and are
provided on this website soley for educational and cultural purposes.
I
have made no attempt to arrange the slides in any particular order. The
precise years in which the photos were taken is unknown, and I offer no
interpretation of the scenes.
The images in this group span the last decades of the
nineteenth century and possibly the early years of the twentieth
century, when ranching, logging, subsistence farming, and coal mining
were the major economic activities in the area. These images have
a simple, rustic appearance, different from the images of the Resort
Days or Eldorado Springs Today. The early portrait-style scenes
were tyical of the late nineteehth century when photography was used to
document the pioneer families and their homes. The restored
Dunn-Debacker home is located on Boulder Open Space near the Mesa
Trailhead.
These images document the "Classic Period" of Eldorado
Springs history, which was most of the first half of the twentieth
century. The photos span several decades, and there many
differences between earlier and later photos of the same
location. These are familiar scenes of the swimming pool,
the resort, the crazy stairs, Ivy Baldwin tightrope walking, hillside
cabins, etc. The modern Swimming Pool looks almost the same as
the one in the photos. The most recent photos in this series show
the construction of the Community Ditch.
These photos taken in the autumn of 2003 clearly show how
much our community has changed. What is striking about Eldorado Springs
compared to other modern residential neighborhoods is the density of
very diverse homes--small and large--and the close proximity of
neighbors to each other. Some homes still ressemble the resort
cabins of the Classic Period, many have been rebuilt, remodeled, and
enlarged for year-round occupancy.
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