Four Mile Historic Park: a place for all seasons

Parks & Recreation, Jan, 1998 by James Edward Hartman

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.