Four Mile Historic Park: a place for all seasons.

For the past 85 years, a buckskinned Kit Carson, rifle in hand, has been sitting astride his horse high atop the Pioneer Monument near the Colorado State Capitol in downtown Denver, Colorado. Below him are larger-than-life bronze figures representing a prospector, a hunter, and a pioneer mother and child. The monument marks the intersection of the gold-rush trails that once Western plains. While Carson points westward, he is looking eastward, toward Four Mile House, the last stagecoach stop and wayside inn on the way to Denver. The house rests four miles from the monument, which is located at Denver's Civic Center.

Stagecoach stops -- where horse teams were changed and passengers could stretch and get a bite to eat and perhaps a little rest -- once dotted the trails, but nearly all of them are now gone, burned during the Indian Wars or simply fallen to ruin. But, Four Mile House remains just as it has for 138 years. It stands in the middle of Four Mile Historic Park, a 14-acre rural oasis in the Denver metropolitan area. This remarkable survivor of the earliest gold rush-days was built in 1859 and is Denver's oldest standing structure. It was first recorded in the Historic American Building Survey in 1934, is a registered Denver Landmark, and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. While owned by the city and county of Denver and administered under the Department of Parks and Recreation, it is operated under contract by the nonprofit Four Mile Historic Park, Inc.

Four Mile House came to be when two husky Ohioans, Samuel and Jonas Bratner, decided to halt their wagon train along the Cherokee Trail, stake a land claim, and erect a one-and-a-half-story log house in a wooded creek bottom. The trail they had been following connected Bents Fort along the Santa Fe Trail to the south with Fort Laramie along the Overland Trail to the north. The old trail had been used for several decades by trappers and traders, but after the 1858 gold strikes, it began to carry gold seekers to the fledgling tent city of Denver.

Last Dash to Town

Just one year after they built the house on the frontier, the Bratners sold it to Mary Calker, an enterprising widow from Wisconsin. She turned it into a wayside inn and tavern. There she and her two teenage children greeted the trail-weary prospectors, hunters, and pioneer mothers and children as well as merchants, assayers, and preachers, freshened them up, and sent them on their last dash to town.

A major flood in 1864 nearly washed the house away and prompted the widow to sell the property to another couple from Wisconsin, Levi and Millie Booth, who continued to operate the inn and tavern for travelers. The arrival of the railroad in 1870, however, brought to an end the property's life as a stagecoach stop. Instead of moving on, however, the Booths turned to farming, eventually aggregating more than 650 acres of prime bottom land in the Cherry Creek valley. Over the years, the farm prospered, and in 1883 the Booths built a fine brick Victorian home that connected their log house to a small frame building that had been erected nearby.

A Story to Be Told

Hardly 25 years old, the enlarged Four Mile House already conveyed the history of a dwelling being transformed from a rough hewn gold rush-era house and furnishings -- some handmade on the spot, some brought by wagon -- to a Victorianera brick residence fitted out with fine furnishing brought by the railroad. Denver was also experiencing a transformation, moving from its rustic, simple pioneer years to the beginning of its urbane future. It is this story that the house -- even then -- was uniquely able to convey, but only to the family and friends of the Booths. Some 90 years had to pass before that story could be related to all.

During those eventful years changes did take place. The surrounding land was sold and developed. Eventually, the house itself was about to disappear from the Colorado landscape, like so many other first-generation buildings. Four Mile House, however, was rescued by a small band of farseeing friends called the Park People. The land was annexed, and the city was persuaded to buy the house and surrounding 14-acre site and dedicate this historic survivor as its most unique park.

Through a succession of private and public governing structures, the park has been developed over the past 20 years. Today, the nonprofit Four Mile Historic Park, Inc., governed by a 15-member board composed of both city appointees and elected members, oversees its operation, which is supported heavily by the Four Mile Historic Park volunteers and by a sustaining core of stalwart Park People.

While Four Mile House once served the pioneers traveling along the historic Cherokee Trail, the house is now an amenity along the heavily used Cherry Creek path, a major artery for bikers, inline skaters, walkers, and runners. The 15-mile path takes these off-road travelers from Denver's outskirts into the heart of the city, along the picturesque and now tame Cherry Creek, with its wildlife, its trees, its parklands, its meandering and occasionally cascading waters, and its pioneer history.

What do they see as they catch glimpses of this wonderful place? Just fields and open space? Maybe. But, those who look closer see far more. They see a magical place of many moods, a historical place for many people, a special place for many reasons, a park for many seasons.

School children come to experience the life of their great, great grandparents: a time less complicated and manipulated by technology, chemicals, and genetic engineering. Here, life is stripped to their senses -- what they can see and hear, touch and smell and feel.

As the sun rises over old Four Mile House, its barns and jack leg fences, the rooster crows and smoke rises from the wood-burning stove where school children will bake cookies and bread before the morning is over. The wash tubs are filled with water from the well, and the hard wooden benches in the canvas schoolhouse await their pupils.

Maybe today the blacksmith will heat up the forge where school classes will gather to watch metal artfully turned into tools and hardware. The teamster may corral Dick and Dan, the muscular Percherons (draft horses), and fit them out to pull a recently restored cherry red Concord coach or a farm wagon loaded with children or maybe a plow or a disc. Across the way, the herb garden offers "pinch-and-sniff" herbs including sage, rosemary, and dill; the kitchen garden proffers its harvest of vegetables and the orchards their apples. This is a day that will bring history to life for children who, in the midst of television, computers, and portable compact disc players, will have a better chance to grasp the history conveyed in their classrooms and books -- the real source of their food.

The log house that the brothers Bratner built, the stage stop and tavern that the widow Calker ran, and the farm house that the Booth family occupied for more than 80 years will soon be filled with visitors. There is the tobacco twist so valued at the time that it sometimes functioned as money, the playing cards with no numbers (for the players who couldn't read the numbers but could count the spots), and Indian chiefs and the nation's fathers, instead of kings and queens (because monarchies were still distrusted in the country). There are the pelts and furs that were traded and the gold-dust scale that measured the transaction and the violin that symbolizes the simplicity of the entertainment available on the frontier.

Across the narrow hall is the 1860s parlor. Abraham Lincoln's picture hangs on the wall, not far from the hair wreath that always begs questions about Victorian taste. The adjacent bedroom has a narrow, short bed shelf where occupants reclined, while upstairs, the open loft shelters the belongings of the typical travelers of the day -- a Civil War-era veteran, a latter-day trapper, a hunter, a miner, and a farmer.

Up five stairs and through a doorway is a different world, one closer to our own, that of the relative luxury brought by the railroad -- the elegant Victorian chairs and settee, the graceful window coverings, the Axminster carpet, the pump organ, comfortable bed and chest of drawers, and kitchen and dining rooms furnished with matching chairs and even a water pump. How times changed from the days of President Lincoln to those of President Harrison.

But, Four Mile Historic Park is more than a place for the education of young and old; it is a place of celebration. It is a place to celebrate the change of seasons, the foods we eat, our major national holidays, and events of importance to Colorado's ethnic peoples. It is a place of music and dancing, of singing and story telling. It is a place of traditional crafts demonstrations and a traditional place for innovative art displays. It is a place where people exchange and renew their marital vows, where families come together for reunions, and where companies hold their picnics and corporations invite their clients.

Why do they come here of all places? Indeed, why do we work so hard to preserve this place for them to come? Or, as author David McCullough once asked in the address `American Values':

What is this pull? Why do we care -- you and I -- about history? Is it because we are Americans and we care about our country? Because we love our country, as we would care about our past, the beginnings of someone we love? Or, is it larger than that? And is it strange, this commitment we have to understanding the past? Or conversely, why are there so many out there who do not care? Are they tone-deaf? Are they color-blind? What are we really doing with our efforts in saving buildings, writing books, making films, taking photographs, caring about who we are, where we came from?

Responding to his own question, McCullough said, "What we really are interested in, what we really care about is life, people, and what happened to them and why, and what changed, what was new."

At bottom, interest in the past and in what has been handed down to us is important to our well-being as residents of our towns and nation. Colorado's poet laureate, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, put it this way. "I think we always have to begin right now, right where we are, to get the meaning of things. I think we can wander to the ends of the earth, to different places, but wherever we go, we're stuck with that old question. Where am I?' `What is the meaning of this? `What place is this?' The meanings of place are very, very compelling.'

Author James Howard Kunstler repeats the refrain in his book The Geography Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Manmade Landscape, in which he notes the slowness with which we recognize and preserve the legacy that has been passed down to us, "Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new, we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away."

Kunstler goes on to point to the people who built our towns and to call them "stewards, official or otherwise, of that complex of values known as pride of place." In his book Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century, Kunstler says, "Americans are just beginning to awake from a long coma of complacency that they fell into a half century ago."

Connecting Visitors With the Past

Perhaps this is what our visitors seek -- the story of those who built a place like Four Mile House, who stopped on the way west to build a city called Denver and a state called Colorado, who stayed to farm the land and raise a family as stewards of this historic place. Who were they? Why did they come? Why did they stay? It is a story about life, people, what happened to them, what was new, and what changed. It is a story that connects our visitors with a community's past and, more importantly, with the pioneer spirit that nourished it

Four Mile Historic Park is, indeed, a place of many seasons and many reasons, a place for education, a place for celebration, a place for contemplation, a place for inspiration, a place for recreation and, indeed, for re-creation. It is a place where we find peace and tranquility in the midst of the metropolitan din, a place where we -- visitors, volunteers, and staff -- even find a part of ourselves.