Long Time Gone

Travelers along Highway 287 know that they probably better slow down substantially while going through the small town of Hugo located in Lincoln County between Kit Carson and Limon. As travelers slow their roll through this charming town, they are bound to have time to catch the site of a beautiful brick building off to the south of the highway.

Appearances can be deceiving in these High Plains of Colorado. A small gathering of snow clouds on the horizon can, within just a few hours, become a blizzard killing hundreds of cattle.

It has been 40 years since the locally owned and operated First National Bank in Eads closed its doors on a cold and dreary Valentine’s Day—February 14, 1985. It was a Thursday, and as the clock struck 3:00 p.

Four years ago, December 10, 2020, Kathy Wilmot, Beaver City, Nebraska, contacted me through Facebook messenger on the Southeast Colorado Private Property Rights Council Facebook page. She requested assistance to oppose a 49-county National Heritage Area (NHA), proposed by Kansas Nebraska Heritage Area Partnership (KNHAP).

George Gotto has many things in common with George Bailey, the main character in the beloved classic holiday film, It’s a Wonderful Life. First off, of course, is the obvious similarity of their first name. To be sure, they both were bankers for many years.

Liberty School stood for sixty years and might have stood for sixty more. Within, classrooms echoed the sound of silence, the hall filled with school equipment, desks and obsolete computer monitors.

These days, everyone carries their own phone in their pocket and these phones not only can call anyone anywhere for the user, but they can also give the use the answer to any question they might ever have. Our cell phone has made this world very small and accessible.

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s there became a social unrest in this country unlike no other as a generation of Americans began to question authority by protesting the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Desegregation in our schools, and the role of women in our society. It was a time when brutality was at its worst.

As the country known as North Korea has recently made headlines in the United States and many times becomes the focus of much speculation, it also becomes immediately apparent how little the average American knows of the place. In many ways that’s understandable; the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, has gone to almost unprecedented lengths to ban exposure to the “outside world” from those who reside inside the country’s borders and, likewise, puts forth unequalled efforts in making sure the eyes of the world only see the parts of North Korea that Kim Jong Un wants to be seen.

For the next few weeks, the Independent will explore the series of history stories written by C. Frost Liggett, the first newspaper man in the county when it was just beginning in the 1880s. Liggett began to write his memories of the original people who came to this area some fifty years later.