This year, the tour will start at 9 a.m. May 18 at the Hesperus Baptist Church, 22972 Colorado Highway 140.<\/p>\n
Helen Ruth Aspaas, whose family moved to the Hesperus area in the early 1870s, said like most mining towns that bust, there aren\u2019t many visual relics to remind people of Hesperus\u2019 past. Instead, the past lives on through stories handed down through generations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s so much history here, but there\u2019s not much to show for it,\u201d Aspaas said. \u201cBut isn\u2019t that true for any mining community?\u201d<\/p>\n
Duane Smith, a retired Fort Lewis College history professor, said Hesperus got its start as a coal mining town. At its height in the early 1900s, the town had as many as 800 to 900 residents, he said.<\/p>\n
Just outside Hesperus proper, a community known as Parrot City almost became the county seat of La Plata County. The effort was thwarted, however, by residents in Durango who called for an election and out-voted those in Parrot City, which now no longer exists.<\/p>\n
But as coal mining declined, so did available jobs, and more families started to move away.<\/p>\n
\u201cHesperus had its moment in the limelight, you could say,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s certainly a legacy left behind.<\/p>\n
John Peel, a former columnist for The Durango Herald<\/em>, will tell one such story at a stop along the tour.<\/p>\n Peel wrote a two-part series <\/a>for the Herald <\/em>in the early 2010s about a Secret Service agent who in 1907 was gunned down in cold blood while investigating alleged illegal coal mining activities in Hesperus.<\/p>\n We won\u2019t give you all the details here. You\u2019ll have to go on the tour for that.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was the first special agent to be killed in the line of duty,\u201d Peel said. \u201c(President) Teddy Roosevelt was mad. It was a national story.\u201d<\/p>\n Aspaas, who grew up in Hesperus, intends to tell the story of the hard life of Annie Puetz, who was twice widowed and had to support three children. She did this by bootlegging from her home in Hesperus, which still stands today and is a stop on the tour.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was apprehended and went to jail for a year in West Virginia,\u201d Aspaas said. \u201cBut she came back.\u201d<\/p>\n Andrew Gulliford, a history professor at FLC, said his talk will focus more on the silver and gold mining that occurred north of Hesperus in La Plata Canyon. One of his main topics: the life of Olga Little, who holds such stalwart stories as saving a group of male miners from a blizzard.<\/p>\n \u201cShe is really one of the most unique women in the American West, and we can claim her as a La Plata County resident,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But outside these eye-grabbing stories, Hesperus has remained over the years an agricultural community. That\u2019s the Hesperus that Aspaas remembers fondly from childhood.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was not that much different than it is now,\u201d she said of her childhood.<\/p>\n But these days, there is a change in the air as more people discover Hesperus, which offers a quiet place to live and a relatively short commute to Durango. And, it\u2019s still affordable.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m seeing more young families and professional couples,\u201d she said. \u201cThey seem to be showing a stronger sense of wanting to be part of the community.\u201d<\/p>\n