An 1880s Victorian Mansion in the Colorado Rockies: The Estemere Estate at Palmer Lake

by Edwards, Daniel

  On these looms we did a variety of weaving—leno, Finnweave, Swedish knotted pile-weaving, Spanish open-work, warp-face weaves, three-harness weaving in several styles, several Scandinavian weaves, lace-weave or “mock-leno,” double-width cloth and seamless bags, the Indian saddle-blanket weave…. We also did a lot of card-weaving and made belts on a little English “Inkle” loom…. I got my loom from…Leicester, England. The cost, including postage and duty, is about five dollars…. We worked out many patterns and four distinct techniques for the inkle loom. One of our members, when she left for home, took her “inkle” along in her hand, to weave on the train.

  We all greatly enjoyed seeing Mrs. Fisher’s wonderful collection of textiles, and the beautiful hand-spun silk and Angora yarns produced at El Conejo Blanco….

  Scarves in leno weave, such as we made at Palmer Lake will be particularly attractive. We set up two looms in this weave, one with a warp of white spun silk and the other with a warp of Fabri yarn…. On these warps we used a variety of weft materials—floss silks, “novelty” yarns of many different kinds, combinations of material. The results were charming…. Length and width for a scarf are matters of taste. Ours were set 14” and 15” wide and were woven about a yard and a quarter long. Some, made with Angora yarn on the Fabri warp, were particularly soft and lovely….

  Another thing we worked out at Palmer Lake will, I believe, prove a novelty and can be used for small bags, flat purses and so on. This is a simple warp-face effect on four harnesses…. The Finnweave offers many delightful possibilities for Christmas weaving. We wove a whole menagerie of strange birds and beasts, also conventional patterns of many kinds,

  1937 letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to El Conejo Blanco.

  at Palmer Lake…. The dog and cat [designs shown on the page] are two Peruvian animals drafted at Palmer Lake…. A Finnweave runner made at the Institute was a particularly handsome piece….

  One of the things we did at Palmer Lake that proved of particular interest was the three-harness weave. We set this up in wool and wove some very handsome knee-blankets. We also set it up in two different forms in fine warp on two table looms. The three-harness weave is one of the most exciting things in hand-weaving.[106]

  Many people who had heard about the weaving school came to observe the weavers at Estemere during the four months the El Conejo Blanco School was there. When the School closed, some of the women were able to continue their education. Three students won scholarships to study other crafts at the Teacher’s College in Greeley; one enrolled in education at Colorado College. Others found gainful employment.

  Lucile Decola, who has been a student of El Conejo Blanco since last November, has accepted a position with the Cromaine Crafts of Hartland, Mich. Helen Tobiska left Saturday for Cherau, Colo, where she will teach home economics. Lupe Alvardo will leave Sunday for a position in Tulsa, Okla. [107]

  El Conejo Blanco, an “experiment in vocational education,” closed in early September, without realizing Anna Fisher’s hopes of adding other crafts to the curriculum, such as the husbandry of raising Angora rabbits and sheep, and wood, leather, and metal working. Fisher moved to Colorado Springs shortly thereafter. Before she left Estemere, however, Anna wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt describing El Conejo Blanco and its mission, and asking, indirectly, for financial support. A few days later, Fisher received a letter from Mrs. Roosevelt commending her work and wishing she might visit the school. However, the First Lady said she could not provide funding for the school.

  The Co-operative Movement and the Farmers Union (1938)

  During the 1930s, Estemere played host to a wide variety of people and activities. The mansion opened its doors to programs and meetings that addressed the desperate economic situation of the country at large: camps for impoverished girls; visits by boys whose achievements in selling newspapers were regarded as exemplary behavior and worthy of reward, because American society valued individual initiative and efforts to earn money; and vocational training classes to equip young women with the skills to make useful handmade products. In doing so, the hope was that women would develop their creativity, derive personal satisfaction, and achieve peace of mind. Underlying the view that valued women doing their own spinning and weaving was a philosophy stressing the moral virtues of returning to a simpler, “pre-industrial” lifestyle and producing hand-made goods in largely self-sufficient village communities.

  Finley Thompson’s old home at Palmer Lake was the scene of one more event that we know of, and it is a vivid reminder of how the social and political tremors shaking American society at that time were felt even within the walls of Estemere. The following notice is all the information we have about this event:

  Sunday, June 26 [1938], a group of people of the Cooperative Institute will meet at the Estemere. This meeting [will be] attended by people interested in the cooperative movement in Colorado and the western states. Two national leaders will be present. They are Harvey Solberg of North Dakota, who was a former state representative of North Dakota, and Mrs. Elsie Olson of Kansas City. The theme of the meeting will be “The History and Meaning of the Cooperative Movement.”[108]

  Harvey R. Solberg

  Harvey Solberg came to Colorado in 1937 to join the staff of the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union of Colorado and to become an organizer and director of education. His subsequent career was proof of his talents and leadership abilities: state secretary in 1938, then president of the renamed Rocky Mountain Farmers Union from 1940 to 1962. He became known as the “cartooning cooperator” for the chalk talks he gave at meetings held in rural areas around the state, such as the presentation he must have made at Estemere in July 1938. The message Solberg gave that day probably referred to ideas held in common by Farmers Union organizations around the country.

  The Farmers Union believed that its cooperative movement could lead to a world without war, and in the 1930s the organization held strongly isolationist views. It taught that the concept of cooperation was rooted in Christian values such as service to others, unselfishness, and the brotherhood of man. Cooperatives were viewed as a remedy for the flaws of capitalism and a means to reduce farmers’ dependence on “middlemen” that stood between farmers and consumers. These included institutions like the speculative system of farm commodity trading, banks (whose foreclosures of farm mortgages could leave farmers homeless), railroads (whose rates for shipping farm produce could eat up farm profits), and food processors of agricultural produce. Farmer-owned cooperatives could help farmers take control of their own destiny by arranging to store crops if market prices were depressed and by offering insurance, loans, and other services to farmers on favorable terms.

  Solberg surely invoked the ideal of the family farm with its reverence for, and attachment to, the land, the view that the farmer makes the best citizen of a democracy, and that living on a farm is “better” than living in a big city. He likely articulated the grievances farmers had in the 1930s, and recalled the roots of the Farmers Union in the prairie populism and agrarian radicalism movements during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Farmers then were faced with falling agricultural prices, mounting debts, and the growth of tenant farming, similar to situations many were facing in 1938. The concept of parity was a key demand of farmers, a means to protect the purchasing power of farmers and to ensure that farm income would be equivalent to that of other occupations. Solberg would have pointed out that the Colorado branch of the national Farmers Union organization strongly supported New Deal legislation like the Agriculture Adjustment Act and newly-created federal programs to benefit agriculture that were implemented by agencies such as the Farm Security Administration, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Rural Electrification Administration.

  A few weeks after Solberg’s program at Estemere, the creator of the New Deal relief and social reconstruction programs, President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself, made a brief stop at Palmer Lake on 12 October 1938.[109] While the steam engine pulling the presid
ential special train took on water at Palmer Lake, FDR must have gone to the rear platform of his observation car to wave to all the townspeople who had gathered at the Rio Grande station to catch sight of him. After a few minutes, the train left, and the President was gone.

  One cannot help imagining that if President Grover Cleveland had come to Palmer Lake by train in 1887 and stopped for a quick look at the boats on Palmer Lake and a breath of fresh mountain air, Finley Thompson, not faced with penetrating a wall of Secret Service protection, would have seized the opportunity. Assuming his best aristocratic manners, Finley immediately would have convinced the President to get into the Thompson carriage and go to Estamere, where Finley would have briefed Cleveland on his latest plans for developing Palmer Lake and asked if he were interested in purchasing some land in the town to build a retirement home. Alas, by 1938, there was no one in Palmer Lake as persuasive and charismatic as Thompson, and political handlers in charge of the president’s schedule and Secret Service agents would not have allowed FDR to get off the train and look around the town. Thus, Estemere was denied the honor of a visit by the President of the United States.

  Personalities of Estemere (1929-1938)

  Esther G. and Omer A. Coppock

  Omer Coppock was born in Texas in 1890 and married Esther Gray in 1919. They lived on a farm in Fowler, Kansas, in 1920, but about 1925 moved to Palmer Lake where they became teachers in the local public school. Omer Coppock established the Pikes Peak Woodland School at Estemere that opened in September 1929 but closed the following year. The Coppocks were interested in providing a different kind of schooling—using what today might be called progressive or experimental methods of education. In this, they must have been guided in part by their Quaker philosophy. The Coppocks left Palmer Lake in the mid-1930s and went to Victor, Colorado.

  Mary Meigs Atwater

  Mary M. Atwater was already an internationally recognized authority on American hand-weaving when she came to Estemere in 1937 to conduct a three-week class at the El Conejo Blanco School. She was born in Illinois in 1878, made a summer tour of Europe in 1895, and for six years attended the Chicago Art Institute School of Design and studied art in Paris. She married Maxwell Atwater in 1903; he was a mining engineer, who took her to Telluride, Colorado, and other Western mining camps. Mary and Maxwell lived in Bolivia and Mexico before returning to Butte, Montana. Mary Atwater began weaving in 1916; she was an Army occupational therapist during World War I. After Maxwell died in 1919, Mary moved to Seattle, where she started a shuttle-craft guild correspondence course in 1922 and began publishing the “Shuttle-Craft Guild Bulletin.” Later, she moved with her son to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she taught weaving. Atwater’s book, Shuttle-Craft Book of American Hand-weaving, published in 1928, has long been considered a classic work in its field. Mary Atwater moved back to Basin, Montana, in 1928, and that became her “home base” for 20 years. Atwater took a group of weavers on tour to Mexico in 1956, and died shortly after on 05 September in Salt Lake City, where she had lived since 1947.

  Mary Atwater came to Palmer Lake in August 1937 to hold her first weaving institute at Estemere. For many years to follow she taught at other Atwater Institutes held around the United States and Canada. Through her Guild, correspondence course in hand-weaving, original research and publications, her resurrecting and modernizing weave patterns, her knowledge about the technical aspects of weaving and looms, the classes on weaving she taught, and her interests in weaving as a form of occupational therapy, Mary Meigs Atwater played a significant role in reviving the craft of handweaving in America. She has been called “the Dean of American hand-weaving, a woman ahead of her time, possessed of great intellect, energy, and talent.”

  Anna Linderfelt Fisher

  Anna Fisher was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 12 June 1878. Her father, an immigrant from Sweden, was the librarian at the Milwaukee Public Library and had been elected president of the American Library Association, when he was charged and convicted of embezzlement in 1892. A sympathetic judge suspended Fisher’s sentence, but he fled the state and settled in Paris, France. His family joined him there, where Anna enrolled in the Lycee Feneion (Paris) and later the Universite de Poitiers. Anna returned to America and married William B. Fisher of San Francisco in Colorado Springs on 07 November 1903. Fisher, twenty years Anna’s senior, was a mining engineer and worked at mines in Idaho, Missouri, Colorado, and Utah. After Anna separated from her husband about 1910, she moved to Santa Barbara, California.

  Anna was in Europe when World War I broke out, and after the War ended, she did relief work for the Red Cross and became director of the American Red Cross Orphanage in Damascus, Syria, and then a director of social service work there under the provisional military administration of the Arab Emir, Faisal, in 1919-20. In 1921, Faisal was crowned King of Iraq, and he appointed Anna Fisher an honorary captain in his Arab Army. Anna returned to the United States and ran the restaurant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for five years. In 1927, King Faisal of Iraq appointed Anna to be attaché of the Ministry of Education and to engage in social work and to re-establish ancient arts and crafts in Iraq. While in Iraq, Anna traveled extensively to prepare a pictorial record of Faisal’s kingdom, and she held an exhibition in Baghdad entitled “Your Beautiful Iraq.” Soon after, Mrs. Fisher returned to the United States because of failing health. She published two articles in Asia magazine about her experiences in Iraq.

  Anna lived in Palmer Lake from 1935 to 1937. She was house director and home economics teacher at the first New Deal-funded educational camp for older unemployed women at Pine Crest. She also taught at the second camp that ran from December 1935 to June 1936. In the third vocational training school (September 1936 to September 1937), Fisher, working with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Orr, taught the weaving and spinning of Angora rabbit wool into fine textiles, and directed the El Conejo Blanco School. El Conejo Blanco and its students first met at Pinehurst (the former Sherwin home), then relocated to Estemere on 01 May 1937 and remained there until early September. Anna Fisher continued El Conejo Blanco as a business venture in Colorado Springs after the close of the weaving school at Estemere, but due to poor health, went to Millbrook, New York, to stay with family. She died there 17 October 1939 at the age of 61. Under provisions in her will, 1,200 negatives of photographs Anna and her Syrian colleague had taken in Iraq were donated to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

  Dr. Robert Harrison Graham and Daughter Roberta

  Robert H. Graham was born in Luling, Texas, on 22 January 1879. As a young man, he participated in cattle drives along the Red River from Texas to South Dakota. He married his first wife, Janie, about that time and worked as a druggist in Denver. The couple had two children, Marvis and Robert. Graham reported that he received an undergraduate degree from the University of Denver in 1901 and an M.D. from the University of Tennessee Medical School at Memphis in 1911, but neither institution is able to verify this. He did receive a Texas medical license in October 1916. Graham and his second wife, Lelia, had three daughters, Lillian, Lucile, and Roberta, all of whom stayed at Estemere during the summers of 1933 and 1934, when the family rented the house from Ray Niswanger. Since Estemere was no longer available for rent in 1935, the Graham family spent part of that summer at Judge Frank McDonough’s cottage in Glen Park.

  Dr. Graham was an eye, ear, and throat specialist who practiced in Wichita Falls, Texas, for 22 years, and for some of that time he worked for the MKT Railroad. Later, he practiced in Dallas and Corpus Christie, Texas, and Clayton, New Mexico. Robert Graham died on 04 December 1951.

  [Roberta Graham Clarke sent her photo, right, and her dad’s photo, above. She had moved back to the Palmer Lake area in 1982 and lived in Woodmoor with her husband, Robert, until 1995. She spent the summers of 1933 and 1934 at Estemere. Roberta died at the age of 93 in Midland, Texas, on 10 Dec 2011.]

  The Mead family in Glen Park took the photos on the next page at Estemere in 1934. It is
believed the girls are Dr. Graham’s daughters; the photo of the girl on the teeter-totter is labeled “Ruth.” It is unknown if that photo was taken at Estemere; perhaps the Gamma Phis had installed a teeter-totter and other playground equipment for the young girls at their camps in 1931 and 1932.

  Rev. Evalena Macy

  One of the most beloved and influential figures in the history of Palmer Lake, Evalena Macy was born near Emporia, Kansas, on 11 October 1889. She received a BA degree from Friends University in Wichita, Kansas, in 1917 and a master’s degree from Columbia University. She also took classes at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1921, Miss Macy (as she became known in Palmer Lake) went with a group of graduates from Friends University as a Quaker missionary to Cuba, where she taught in a mission school and a Sunday School. She had to leave Cuba in 1923 and spent years recovering her health. In October 1927, Miss Macy settled in Palmer Lake. She was a teacher at the Pikes Peak Woodland School at Estemere in 1929-30, and continued to be invited to dinners and programs at Estemere throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Evalena Macy became pastor of the Palmer Lake Friends Community Church (later popularly called the Little Log Church) in October 1930 and served in that position for 29 years. In 1934, Miss Macy and the church youth group organized the first public “Yule Log” ceremony in the town. She received the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humanities from Friends University in 1951.