Edie DeWeese of Allenspark is its local historian

Story by Elisabeth Sherwin

The early history of Allenspark, Colo., has been preserved largely thanks to one woman: Edie DeWeese.

She was born into a pioneer Allenspark family who came to the area in 1904.

DeWeese, 74, says you could accuse her of embracing “impostor syndrome” since she is not a technically trained historian.

“But if you stay somewhere long enough you are the only one who remembers anything,” she says. “And I love the people.”

Her story begins with her great-grandparents.

“My great-grandparents, Frank V. Gay and Mary, came to Lyons and Allenspark and filed a mining claim,” she said. They were from Kansas and started coming to the mountains every year to escape seasonal hay fever.

The mining claim was unsuccessful but they liked the area and bought the northwest central plat in the village of Allenspark.

Frank’s daughter, Edith, married Andy Hansen and they had three children. Andy built the cabin two doors south of the Allenspark Community Church, which still stands today.

“My mother was the second of those three children, Mary Gay Hansen,” DeWeese said. Mary Hansen married Jack DeWeese. They had two daughters, Edie and Monica.

“I came to Allenspark for the first time in 1953 for a visit with my Hansen grandparents and I loved it,” she added.

Mary and Jack DeWeese decided to move year-round to Allenspark in January of 1956. The family lived in the unwinterized cabin that now has the address of 26 Washington St.

“It was colder than cold,” DeWeese remembered. She walked a block to school in Allenspark past piles of snow that towered over her. There were seven kids total in the school, which now is a private home.

But the family found that life in an unwinterized cabin was too hard, so they moved to Lyons and then to Boulder where her father had a jewelry store.

“We would still come up to the cabin a lot, on weekends,” she said.

DeWeese went to high school in Boulder and then attended CU Boulder for two years before marrying John Bell in 1970. The couple divorced in 1975. Those were her self-described hippie years.

In those days, hippies were not popular in Allenspark.

While both DeWeese’s mother and grandmother were members of The Hilltop Guild, a lady’s club, DeWeese was not made to feel welcome.

“The way I remember The Hilltop Guild situation in the early 70s is that the Guild ladies didn’t want any ‘hippies’ to join. My mother and grandmother had both been in the Guild since the beginning and many members knew me, so they might have given me a pass. Even so, I couldn’t take advantage of my ‘birthright’ status when other young women were being excluded.

“Since then, the Guild ladies have graciously invited me to join many times, and, while I’ve declined, I have volunteered in other ways to support them,” she said.

As an adult, DeWeese lived in another family cabin half-block from the original homestead. This cabin at 169 Second Ave. was built out of wood from the 1890s Allenspark school.

She made that her home from 1972 to 2005 during which time she drove to Boulder for her job at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“I was a technical editor. But I began as a clerk and over the course of 31 years I moved up to head of publications.”

That was where she learned to write and turn documents into publications.

On the job, she said, you don’t wait for the muse, you just write.

Her day job helped with her volunteer job at The Wind. The first edition was published in 1974.

“We had two electric typewriters and would put out The Wind in anyone’s kitchen we could find. I did typing, copy-editing, paste-up, everything.”

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