Trinidad, Co

Tressie and Forrest Teegarden left their hometown of Trinidad 38 years ago, but a fat little newsletter keeps the Tucson, Ariz., couple and some 700 other former Trinidadians involved with their southern Colorado hometown of 9,500.

The Friends of Historical Trinidad newsletter updates those who’ve moved on the latest news, including high school reunions, wedding anniversaries, school events, and awards, as well as efforts to preserve landmarks.

“I see names of old friends. I shut my eyes and see their faces and maybe even Commercial Street, paved in bricks. It bends, right in the middle of downtown because it lies on a cattle trail,” Mrs. Teegarden says of reading the newsletter.

The stone Victorian buildings lining that street are witness to successful efforts to save historic structures. But it wasn’t always this way.

In the early 1950s, the Trinidad Historical Society despaired because so few in town cared about history. One problem: Whose history?

Trinidad, located on the Santa Fe Trail, was settled by descendants of Spanish conquistadors, Mexican sheepherders, Anglo cattlemen, American Indians, and European miners. Immigrants from Italy, France, Greece, Austria, Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia poured into town to work the area’s coal mines, bringing their own histories, languages, and customs.

That diverse heritage is still visible in the flat-topped adobe homes and buildings in the El Corazon de Trinidad National Historic District, which means “The Heart of Trinidad,” and in the great-grandchildren of Hispanic, American Indian, and European immigrants who play together in parks and at school.

But years ago, differences made it difficult to get people behind preservation—until the local Historical Society appealed to Denver journalists Dolores Plested and Ruth Henritze, both Trinidad natives.

“Ruth and I threw parties and started the semi-annual, 42-year-old newsletter,” Plested recalled.

The Colorado Historical Society acquired the old Baca House. (Built by a Trinidad founder in 1870, it once changed hands for 7,000 pounds of wool.) When the century-old, French Empire-inspired Bloom Mansion at the other end of the block went on the market, Plested and Henritze knew it had to be saved, too.

Plested recalls the sentence she and Henritze inserted in a special fund-raising mailing to newsletter subscribers to help buy the Mansion.

“Even though you have moved away, your heart will remain forever at the foot of Fisher’s Peak,” she wrote. (Fisher’s Peak is a local landmark, across the Purgatoire River west of town.)

Some $13,000 rolled in as a result of the mailings—more than the $8,000 needed to buy the Bloom Mansion. And the town with so many disparate histories suddenly became a town with just one—its own. Former residents paid $10 a year to join the Friends of Trinidad and get the newsletter because they realized the one history they all had in common was the town’s.

Almost overnight, it seemed folks who didn’t give two figs about history were out looking for things to save.

“The newsletter made a huge impact,” says Constance LaLena, a local artist and writer of 10 grants that helped save Trinidad landmarks.

Today, Trinidad has six important museums: Baca House, Bloom Mansion, Santa Fe Trail Museum, Children’s Museum, A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art, and the Louden-Henritze Archaeology Museum. Not counting significant monuments and markers like the bronze Kit Carson Monument.

Diana Mauney, who now edits the newsletter, says landmarks like the two-story Carnegie Library with its stained glass windows and oak-furnished reading rooms are what make Trinidad special today.

Roberta Cordova, who along with her husband, Paul, participates each year in the traditional candlelight walk near the Baca House during the holidays, sums it up best.

“We each hold a lighted candle and sing,” she says. “And that’s when I know I’m home.’’

Hassell Bradley Wright writes from her home in Littleton, Col.

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