Article by Dan Jennings
Pioneer industry – July 1996 – Colorado Central Magazine
Just north of the junction of Highways 285 and 24 at the base of Trout Creek Pass is a treasure trove of Central Colorado history, the Salt Works Ranch, owned by one family since it was founded in the early 1860s.
The name Salt Works comes from the manufacture of salt from brine that bubbles up from a spring next to the old Salt Works which still stands on the ranch. That’s the big chimney you can see on your right as you drive north from Buena Vista to Fairplay on Highway 285.
The brine comes from a natural aquifer of salt water left over from a prehistoric sea.
According to one legend, salt was discovered at the Salt Works ranch in 1860 when a wagon crossed South Park on its way to a gold rush at Oro City near modern Leadville. On board were Horace Tabor and his first wife Augusta, among the first to take a wagon over Ute Pass. They followed much the same route as modern Highway 24.
As the story goes, the Tabor party stopped for the night at a clear spring at the site of today’s Salt Works ranch and made coffee from the spring water. The coffee tasted salty, and the pioneers thought it a cruel joke — until somebody tasted the spring water and realized that they had found a salt spring. But accounts don’t exactly square here.
The presence of salt springs in South Park was known for centuries before the Tabor party “discovered” them. Indians had long taken salt from the springs. The Spanish called the South Park “Valle Salado” which means Salt Valley. French trappers called it “Bayou Salade,” Salt Marsh, and American settlers corrupted this to “Bayou Salado,” the name of the definitive history of South Park.
In Bayou Salado, Virginia Simmons’s book about the valley, this same salt-water coffee story was attributed to Charles Hall. Augusta Tabor’s diary merely said the water was unpalatable to the livestock. Apparently, pioneers were more interested in surviving than in keeping accurate records.
As for salt, it was first harvested commercially in 1861 by a J.C. Fuller. Fuller ordered boilers and began advertising “Pike’s Peak Salt.” But for unexplained reasons Fuller quit, and the task of developing a salt business fell to Charles Hall.
According to Hall’s great-great-grandson, Fairplay Realtor and former merchant marine ship’s captain Karl Fanning, the Salt Works was the second manufacturing plant in Colorado. Today, a cabin built at the ranch in 1861 still stands and serves as a home for the present caretaker.
Charles Hall was born in New York, but grew up in Iowa. In 1858, he came out to the “Pike’s Peak Region” to look for gold. Hall prospected and ran grocery stores in the mining camps until 1861, when he and several companions became lost while prospecting near present-day Silverton in the San Juan mountains. The party was so desperate they boiled shoe leather, flour bags, and leather breeches — and tried to eat them. But when his partners started considering cannibalism, Hall wisely terminated the partnership and went off alone.
Weighing only 48 pounds, Hall was found by a party of prospectors led by Benjamin H. Eaton, a future governor of Colorado, and accompanied by Melissa Nye, a woman whose husband had abandoned her and her children. As Melissa nursed the frail Hall back to health, he fell in love with her, and they married (after she divorced her worthless first husband).
Hall bought the Salt Works Ranch in 1862, and started ranching and dairy farming as he planned his salt manufacturing operation. The property boasted more than brine; nearby was the pure water Buffalo Spring.
A born entrepreneur, Hall believed the Colorado frontier could support a salt works. Salt was a necessity for preserving meat, flavoring food, and refining silver ore. But it was expensive, since it had to be shipped in by wagon from Missouri.
Hall manufactured some salt at the ranch in 1862 and 1863, at first near the Buffalo Spring. But after finding the brine too weak, Hall moved to the present site.
In 1864, Hall organized the Colorado Salt Works with two partners: a Mr. Lone, and John Quincy Adams Rollins, for whom Rollinsville and Rollins Pass near Nederland are named.
They built a 160’x70′ building that still stands, and ordered kettles at $1,500 apiece. Shipped from St. Louis, the kettles were 40 inches across and 30 inches deep. To heat and concentrate brine, the kettles were set over an iron fire box that led to a chimney built from local stone by Italian masons from the Arkansas Valley. The masons made their own cement from local limestone.
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Salt was separated from the brine in evaporating pans 28 feet long. When it was operating at full blast the Salt Works could have employed 16 men. Up to 100,000 pounds of salt could be stored at the works, and up to 700 cords of woods could be stored to feed the wood burning furnace.
The furnace required so much fuel that the works had a steam-powered saw mill just to cut wood for the fire. Special heavy freight wagons hauled the wood to the Salt Works.
Refined salt sold for $4.50 a pound in Denver when it first appeared, but soon dropped to $1. The less-pure stuff for ore processing brought $60 a ton in Georgetown.
The local Utes protested when Hall tried to sell them the salt that they had been gathering for free for centuries. The dispute was settled when the federal government offered the Indians an annuity of salt from the works — but not before the conflict led to one of the more colorful stories from the ranch’s history.
Once, when Melissa Hall was at the ranch alone while Charles and the men were in the hills cutting firewood, a group of Indians arrived. Melissa held them off with a meat cleaver. The chief was so impressed by her fortitude that he later tried to trade a squaw for her.
Travelers often stopped at the Salt Works, and guests included the famous traveling preacher, Father John L. Dyer. Once while trapped by a blizzard, Dyer preached a sermon to the people at the ranch.
The Salt Works ran until 1867 when a law suit was filed challenging Hall’s ownership of the ranch. Hall’s claim was disputed because the land had been homesteaded as agricultural property, but Hall was using part of it to extract a mineral. This suit was settled, but the legal expenses ate up the works’ profits.
The coming of the railroad, first to Cheyenne and then to Denver, was just as bad for the company. The railroad enabled salt to be shipped in cheaply from the east, undercutting Hall’s prices. Because the springs were an inefficient source of brine, Hall couldn’t compete with the eastern price, and by 1868 the Salt Works had closed.
In 1881, a group of investors called the Colorado Salt Works Manufacturing Company decided to try again because of the newly built Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad, which ran across the ranch. They sank a 1,000-foot well to reach stronger brine, and produced a substantial amount of salt from 1881 to 1883.
But in 1883 the Salt Works closed for good as a source of commercial salt. According to Karl Fanning, health and natural food enthusiasts occasionally still come to the ranch and boil brine from the spring.
In spite of the defunct salt works, the Halls stayed at the ranch. In 1875, the main ranch house, which still stands, was completed. It was built as a hotel because the ranch was a stop on the stage line between Fairplay and Buena Vista. In this home, Melissa Hall earned a reputation as a famous and gracious hostess, and guests included General Palmer, founder of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.
As much as she could, Melissa Hall tried to bring civilization to the wild frontier. In 1867, she had one of the first sewing machines in Colorado territory.
Melissa was also a lady who could take care of herself. When a desperado rode into the ranch one day, and told Melissa Hall he was there to kidnap her, Melissa agreed to go with him. But she said she had to change into her riding clothes first.
Melissa asked the man to saddle her horse, and went into her house professing her love for him. When the gullible outlaw went into the house, however, Melissa was waiting with a loaded Winchester. The outlaw beat a hasty retreat, and was later captured by the local posse.
Charles and Melissa Hall left the ranch in 1878 and moved to Leadville, but they continued to own and run the ranch. Charles Hall invested in several business ventures, including plans to bring natural gas to Pueblo and Leadville. Hall also invested in the Windsor Hotel in Denver, one of the state’s most luxurious hostelries. When another investor, H.A.W. Tabor moved there with his infamous second wife, Baby Doe, Hall got so disgusted that he sold his interest in the hotel to Augusta Tabor.
Hall struck it rich when he and a partner, Dennis Sullivan, bought the Mile Mine in the Ten Mile District of Summit County. Hall also owned an interest in the Sixth Street Shaft in Leadville, the Rose Group of Mines in Ouray, and valuable mining properties in Arizona. He served as a state senator from Lake County from 1882 to 1887.
But the real business of the ranch, which continues to this day, is cattle. Hall started raising cattle at the ranch as soon as he arrived, and his great-great- grandchildren still run cattle on the land today.
The Salt Works Ranch has had close associations with many colorful characters over the years. Undoubtedly the most colorful of them was Tom McQuaid, a true cowboy and rancher who was born in 1863 during the Civil War and died in 1968 at the age of 105 just as America was preparing to land men on the moon.
Thomas McQuaid was born in San Francisco and grew up in the cattle business. His parents, who had come west from Massachusetts for the Gold Rush, soon moved to Leadville where McQuaid grew up. McQuaid was stubborn and independent from the start. As a toddler he bit Augusta Tabor’s finger as she was trying to feed him some medicine.
McQuaid’s father ran a dairy in Leadville and a ranch near Buena Vista. As a boy, McQuaid sold as much as 200 gallons of milk a day door-to-door in Leadville to help with the dairy. If that wasn’t enough, Tom McQuaid was riding the range by the time he was 12 years old, and he was still riding a horse when he was 95.
As a 12-year-old McQuaid was out looking for a lost cow when he stumbled into a “ranch” where a group of men were butchering cattle. McQuaid looked around and realized that he had stumbled on the hide-out of a gang of rustlers. His realization came from the brands he spotted on the hides of the dead cattle, but the rustlers didn’t know McQuaid had guessed their secret. They let McQuaid spend the night and even gave him a cow to replace his missing one. McQuaid left the hideout peacefully, but quickly alerted the local posse. And thus the law caught up with the rustlers — who had been butchering other people’s cattle and selling them to the workers building the nearby Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.
In 1889, McQuaid moved to Park County and bought the 63 Ranch. In 1911, he married Charles Hall’s daughter, Mildred Wessels, who had left college to manage her family ranch.
McQuaid moved to the Salt Works, but managed several other ranches, too. In his day, McQuaid ran as many as 10,000 head of Hereford cattle with 14 different brands on 100,000 acres. He also raised a large crop of hay on some of the best meadows in South Park. At one time, South Park hay was shipped as far away as England, and tags for South Park Hay can still be found in antique stores.
Never one to let anything go to waste, Tom McQuaid used the Salt Works as a calving shed, and the brine boiling kettles as watering troughs for the cattle. The cattle used the famous chimney as a scratching post so many times that they rubbed off most of the exterior stones on the bottom. The works themselves are now held up by a three- to four-foot-deep pile of manure. The wagons Charles Hall had bought to haul wood were put to work doing ranch chores, and the evaporating pan was used to feed cattle.
Besides ranching, McQuaid worked as a deputy sheriff. Among other things he helped execute the first woman to be hanged in the state of Colorado for horse theft. McQuaid also helped bring in a number of notorious outlaws, including “Potawatomi Jack.”
Stories about McQuaid abound.
McQuaid held up the building of Highway 285 across his ranch for a year in the 1920s because the state wanted to put the highway through McQuaid’s best hay meadow. The state condemned the land to build the road when McQuaid wouldn’t sell. Then McQuaid held up construction by shooting and stampeding cattle at the workmen, and burning their tents. When the Park County sheriff, who happened to be McQuaid’s friend, refused to arrest the rancher, the state threatened to send in the National Guard. But McQuaid finally relented and let the state build its highway.
McQuaid let people fish and hunt on his land as long as they respected it. Once when a family from Denver camped and picnicked on his land without permission, leaving a pile of trash behind, McQuaid loaded his cowhands into trucks, drove to Denver, and held a picnic for his own men on the offending family’s lawn. He learned their address from a post card in their trash pile, and returned their trash to boot.
When he was 85, McQuaid was insulted by a rancher in Fairplay who had made disparaging remarks about him. So McQuaid saddled his horse and rode the 25 miles to Fairplay with a gun to deliver a message to the offending party. The gentleman retracted his offensive remarks.
McQuaid lived long enough to appear on television. He helped form the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association and the Denver Stock Show which became the National Western Stock Show. Interviewed on TV for the 50th anniversary of the event, McQuaid complained that there were just too many sheep ranchers at the show.
“He had the hardest looking eyes,” said Karl Fanning who remembers his great uncle. Fanning said McQuaid attributed his long life to leaving other people alone.
Life on the Salt Works ranch was good for cow hands when McQuaid ran it. Cowboys were paid $10 a day for their work, but it wasn’t the money that attracted them to the Salt Works. It was the conditions. McQuaid always made sure that the hands had warm and comfortable bunk houses to sleep in, good horses to ride, and good food to eat. McQuaid’s cook was the best, according to Fanning, and cowboys would come to work just for the cooking.
Fanning recalls steak being served three times a day at the ranch. Trucks carried food to the ranch hands on the cattle line, and McQuaid set out dinner and supper tables for the cowboys. Cowhands worked six days a week; on their day off they would drive into Hartsel and take a bath at the nearby hot springs before hitting the local bars for entertainment.
During World War II, when so many men were at war, high-paying jobs at defense plants made help hard to find. McQuaid hired orphan boys to work as cowhands, and some of those boys still come back to the ranch for visits, Fanning said.
Mildred McQuaid died in 1945 and from 1941 to 1968 Richard J. “Red” McHale and his wife managed the ranch and took care of Tom. McQuaid rode horses until he was 95 and fell off, breaking his hip. After that, McQuaid drove jeeps like they were horses, and used up one a month, Fanning recalls. In his old age, McQuaid would sit in his bed in the parlor of the main house and discuss ranch business with his employees. He was a rancher to the very end.
One famous visitor to the ranch during McQuaid’s time was Antoinette “Toni” Perry, Charles Hall’s granddaughter. Born in Denver in 1888, she studied dramatics and starred in a number of famous plays, but “retired” in 1909 to marry Denver businessman Frank Wheatcroft Trueff, president of the Denver Gas and Electric Company. When Trueff dropped dead in 1922, Toni returned to the stage and in 1928 started directing plays. She also produced plays, and became a major figure on Broadway and in New York theater.
During World War II, Perry served as chairman of the board of the American Theater Wing which entertained the troops overseas. At its height the wing sent 1,200 entertainers overseas to boost the troops’ morale. In 1944, Toni decided that America needed a light-hearted farce to make it forget the war and produced “Harvey” by Mary Chase of Denver. The play about a giant rabbit named Harvey, who can only be seen by a lovable drunkard named Elwood P. Dowd, ran for 1,775 performances on Broadway. It also won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie starring Jimmy Stewart as Dowd.
“Harvey” was still playing when Antoinette Perry died on June 28, 1946. After her death producer Jacob Wilks, a friend of Perry’s, suggested that Broadway institute an Antoinette Perry or “Toni” award for excellence in the theater. The Tony Awards were fist presented on Easter Sunday 1947 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and are still presented every year. The awards ceremony is now broadcast on national TV.
Antoinette’s daughter, Elaine Perry, spent her summers on the Salt Works Ranch, and sometimes rode the range with Tom McQuaid. But she spent most of her time in New York City and followed her mother into the theater as an actress and producer. In 1942, Elaine understudied for Ingrid Bergman in a play called “Lilliom” and in 1944-45 she served as a stage manager for her mother’s American Theater Wing Players entertaining troops overseas.
Elaine Perry later produced several plays on Broadway including Anastasia, which was, ironically enough, made into a movie starring Ingrid Bergman. In 1968, Elaine retired and moved to the Salt Works Ranch after Tom McQuaid’s death, where she stayed until her death in 1986.
Unfortunately, most of the land at the Salt Works was sold to pay inheritance taxes after Tom’s death, and some of the best hay meadows ended up in the hands of the Denver Water Department. The meadows are now grazing land, and the water is diverted to Denver for lawn-watering.
Today, there are only 1,000 acres left of the Salt Works Ranch, with another 2,000 acres leased for grazing land for just 100 head of cattle. Three hundred and fifty acres of hay meadows are still irrigated at the ranch. Natural springs provide year-’round water and the ranch is owned jointly by Antoinette Perry’s grandchildren: Karl Fanning, his brother John, and his sisters, Claire Butcher and Toni Koshlap.
“We won’t even think about selling,” Fanning said. “The main thing is to keep it from getting developed up or sold.” According to Fanning, most of the South Park’s ranches have been broken up and sold by real estate developers. But the Fannings will try to keep the ranch in their family and stay there when they can. There are still several cabins on the ranch and the main house, which is under restoration after it was damaged by a propane explosion last year.
The ranch is now 135 years old and has been recognized as a centennial farm by the governor. The owners intend to restore the property as a ranch museum, but they want to keep it in the family. Fanning said that new options in real estate law could allow the family to preserve the ranch while retaining ownership.
“It’s part of our heritage,” Karl Fanning said of the ranch. “We’re all in agreement about preserving it.” Of his family, he says, “I think we’ll be able to keep ranching.” The family intends to bring in about a hundred head of cattle this summer, and to grow hay to keep the ranch alive. “We’re hoping to have a good year,” Fanning concluded.
It’s a far cry from the ten to twenty truckloads of cattle Tom McQuaid shipped out in his heyday, but the Salt Works Ranch is still alive and well.
Daniel Jennings lives in Fairplay and often writes for the Flume, as well as other publications.