How a Monument thoroughfare came to advertise a denomination that no longer worships on it — by way of a fox farm, an army-surplus bunkhouse and a bell that outlasted them all.
Baptist Road is the kind of name people use a thousand times without once wondering about it. It is an interstate exit, a school-traffic artery, a cut-through and, at the right hour, a test of patience. It is not, however, random. The name is a fossil. It records something that has since left.
What left was a Baptist summer camp. For roughly half a century the wooded land at the eastern end of the road belonged to the Black Forest Baptist Assembly, which ran camps among the ponderosa pines on the rise where Sanctuary Pointe’s houses now stand. Locals called the place, simply, the Baptist Camp; the road itself was once Baptist Camp Road, shortened over time to the version on today’s signs.
The land had an earlier and stranger life. Before the Baptists, it was a fox farm — one of the largest in the West, by the reckoning of Tri-Lakes historian Lucille Lavelett. The Black Forest Fur Farm, started in the 1930s, sprawled across some 1,240 acres and more than 900 pens, raising silver foxes whose pelts fetched small fortunes back east. Then fashion turned, a postwar tax bit, and the bottom fell out of fur.
The collapse was the Baptists’ opening. In 1946, by the account of Nita Adkins Castillo — daughter of Ralph Adkins, one of the camp’s founders — Baptist laymen meeting in Grand Junction resolved that Colorado needed a campground of its own, and formed a committee to find one. Three years later they found the ruined fox farm sixteen miles north of Colorado Springs: 1,240 mostly wooded acres, thirteen cottages and a clutch of outbuildings, valued at $124,000 and bought that November for $40,000. The fur bust had made the faithful a bargain. In December 1949 they incorporated as the Black Forest Baptist Assembly of Colorado.
What followed was a study in thrift. The two-story building where foxes had been skinned and feed mixed was converted into a kitchen below and a dining hall above; the cottages were fitted with army-surplus bunks for 125 campers. The first camp opened on July 23rd, 1950 with 260 children and drew 653 over that first summer. By 1961 the number had climbed to 1,600. In 1957 the founding corporation was dissolved and the grounds passed to the Colorado Baptist State Convention. Where silver foxes had once been bred for their pelts, a generation of children was now sent to be saved.
It was not all hymns and hiking. In April 1965, by the account preserved in the local fire district’s wildfire plan, a camper dumped hot ashes, the wind did the rest, and roughly 40 acres of the grounds burned.
The modern chapter is the familiar one. The Baptist Camp land was annexed into the Town of Monument and platted as a 460-acre community; the old cabins and conference center lingered on, leased month to month, until the developers were ready. Classic Homes announced construction of Sanctuary Pointe in 2016. The cabins came down, the master plan went up, and the name stayed, because names usually do.
Two things outlived the bulldozers. High up on the trail network that threads the neighborhood there is still a spot the campers knew as High Vespers — one of the clearings where they gathered at dusk to sing and pray, its companion lower in the trees called Low Vespers. And the camp’s old bell, which once called children to meals and chapel, was salvaged when the houses went in and now hangs at the entrance to the development. For a community sold on its serenity, “Sanctuary” turns out to be less a marketing flourish than a deed of inheritance.
Then comes the punchline. Baptist Road has no Baptist church. To find one, a visitor must leave the road entirely — the town’s Baptist congregations sit on other streets. The lone house of worship on Baptist Road itself, at 675 West Baptist Road, is Family of Christ Lutheran Church. The Baptists named the road and moved off it. The Lutherans, who named nothing, kept the address.
There is a theological neatness here that no committee could have arranged. The Baptists, historically the people most insistent on full-immersion adult baptism, lent their name to a stretch of dry tableland miles from open water. The Lutherans, content to baptize an infant with a handful of water and few follow-up questions, are the ones who actually turn up on Sunday mornings. Call it the quiet Reformation of Baptist Road: the Baptists supplied the name, but the Lutherans answer the mail.
None of which troubles the commuters, the dog-walkers or the families now living on the old campground. The road keeps its name. The bell, mounted at the gate, keeps mostly silent. And down the hill, in a different sanctuary, the singing carries on.
Sources
- Palmer Lake Historical Society talk on fox farming, Our Community News, April 2026 — fur farm to Baptist Assembly (1949), Fox Run Regional Park.
- Palmer Lake Historical Society, “Fox Farms Around the Palmer Divide” (citing Lucille Lavelett).
- “Baptist Camp Road” — Our Community News, September 2012.
- 1954 camp description, Colorado Springs Gazette, May 16, 1954 (Colorado Historic Newspapers).
- Sanctuary Pointe development, N.E.S. Landscape Architects and Classic Homes (2016).
- Family of Christ Lutheran Church, 675 W Baptist Road.
- April 1965 fire: Monument Fire District Community Wildfire Protection Plan (2025).
- Founding history and bell: community recollections, including Nita Adkins Castillo (daughter of founder Ralph Adkins) and January Woody Fairfield.
