Before the Cadets: What the Air Force Bought North of Colorado Springs

Before it was the Air Force Academy, the land north of Colorado Springs held two railroad villages, a governor’s old cattle ranch, a Spanish Colonial estate turned country club, an airfield, a clay pit, a factory and the cabins and graves of homesteaders. Colorado bought it from 159 owners between 1954 and 1957. One of the villages sold for $55.25.

On the morning of June 15, 1954, a glass-topped sightseeing bus from The Broadmoor carried a team of Air Force experts north out of Colorado Springs, through the grounds of the old Woodmen Sanitarium, back onto U.S. 85-87 and off again at the Breed underpass toward the Pine Valley Country Club. At 10 o’clock it reached the Cathedral Rock Angus Ranch, where Larry Lehman, “dressed in straw hat and blue coveralls, greeted each member of the team with a firm handshake,” the Rocky Mountain News reported. Someone asked Ellery Husted, an architect from Washington on the team, whether his family had named the nearby village of Husted. “Certainly not that I know of,” he replied. “Don’t put me in the position of having to deny a special interest in this area.”

Nine days later the Air Force chose the site. It came with tenants. The tract the team toured, about 15,000 acres that grew to 17,500 by the time the buying was done, held a highway hamlet that had been a railroad town, a clay pit, an airfield, a defense plant, a country club and dozens of ranches and homes. The state of Colorado bought all of it on the Air Force’s behalf, with $1 million of its own money, more from Washington and, where owners would not sell, the courts. By January 1957 it had dealt with 159 owners and expected the bill to top $4 million. The U.S. Air Force Academy moved its cadets there in 1958. This is what stood there first.

A creek, then the homesteaders

Monument Creek runs down the eastern side of the Academy. In July 1820 Stephen Long’s expedition came down it from the Palmer Divide, and the expedition’s botanist, Edwin James, found the little stream “inhabited by great numbers of beavers,” with “more timber, and a more fertile soil than any stream of similar magnitude we had lately passed.” Native peoples used the land long before that; the Academy’s marker says it works with 27 federally recognized tribes that have cultural ties to its grounds.

Settlement came with the Homestead Act. A marker the Academy has put up on the walk from its visitor center to the chapel names Aaron Blodgett in Pine Valley and Charles Schubarth in the north among the first, and Harlow and Leafy Teachout, whose hotel near the southern boundary became a stage stop. William Alexander Burgess built a one-room cabin of hand-hewn logs, with a fireplace of river stone, in what became Douglass Valley sometime between 1871 and 1877, according to its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. Leonard and Mary Ann Capps homesteaded nearby around 1870, and were buried there.

Some came for their health. William and Mary Young arrived from Chicago in 1871 because her doctors had prescribed Colorado for her lungs, and bought a ranch on Monument Creek. Her husband built the house with a three-inch gap between the walls and the ceiling all the way around, to let in the healthy air. They moved to Colorado Springs five years later. Their neighbors to the south, the Lennoxes, moved into a log cabin on what they named the Glenwood Ranch in 1872. The children asked the bachelors who had built it whether it had bedbugs and were told there was not a single one. “We found that, as my brother John put it,” 14-year-old Elizabeth Lennox wrote in her diary, “there wasn’t a single one but they all were married and had large families.”

Cathedral Rock, a sandstone formation in the northwest of the grounds, was a favorite picnic spot, and many of the settlers carved their names and the dates of their visits into it.

Two railroads and two Husteds

The Denver & Rio Grande built through in 1871, and the Santa Fe laid a second line along the eastern edge in 1887. Each put a station near the north end of the site, and the settlement split to match: West Husted by the Rio Grande tracks and Monument Creek, East Husted by the Santa Fe. Both were named for Calvin R. Husted, who started sawmills in the pines to the east in 1867 and 1868 and whose lumber went into many of early Colorado Springs’ buildings. He served as an El Paso County commissioner. “He’d give anyone a grubstake,” the News recalled in 1956, “and he died in a Colorado Springs poorhouse.”

Husted stayed small. It had stores, a saloon, a church, a school, a restaurant and a post office, which began in a boxcar converted into a depot, according to Lucille Lavelett, the Monument historian, who compiled its history from former residents in 1979. Its steadiest business was the grade. Northbound Rio Grande trains could get from Colorado Springs to Husted but not up the climb to the Divide, so the railroad kept helper engines, crews and a small roundhouse at West Husted to get them over.

On the morning of Aug. 14, 1909, the northbound Rio Grande train No. 8, which had orders to meet a southbound passenger train at Husted, kept going and hit it head-on beyond the station. Twelve people were killed and more than fifty injured. The State Railroad Commission found that the orders had been properly given and understood, and put the blame on the crew of No. 8 alone. Among the dead was Jack Gossage, a fireman who lived at Husted. In 1918, with the government running the railroads, northbound trains were sent over the Santa Fe and southbound ones over the Rio Grande, and Husted’s helpers and roundhouse were no longer needed. Its post office closed in 1920.

At the south end of the site, near what is now Ice Lake, was Edgerton, named for David Edgerton, who homesteaded on Monument Creek. It had a post office, a store and a hotel, and reached 350 people in 1902, according to Lavelett. From 1874 to 1915 it had what the Academy’s marker calls District 20’s first school, a one-room building whose “bus barn” was a shed for the horses the pupils rode.

Ice, clay and other crops

The Cascade Ice Company, incorporated in 1887, dammed West Monument Creek in the southeast of Pine Valley and cut ice from two reservoirs each winter, between 800 and 3,000 tons a year, loading it onto sawdust-walled boxcars on two railroad sidings. The stonework of the first dam was built by the company of David McShane, the Monument pioneer. The harvest ended in 1906. The second reservoir’s site is now Ice Lake.

At West Husted, Will Shoemaker noticed good clay near the Rio Grande tracks and opened a pit in 1927, shipping a carload a day to the Standard Fire Brick Company in Pueblo. A fox farm run by the Lairds and Hubert Scrivner stood near what Lavelett, in 1979, called the Academy picnic grounds. During Prohibition, she wrote, the canyons west of Husted held “many boot-leg whiskey stills.” One was left behind. A minister who bought a house on the West Husted bluffs found a big copper boiler, a tank and many pipes in the basement and called a plumber to ask what they were. The plumber told him it was “the best equipment for a whiskey still that I have ever seen.”

When the highway came, Husted turned to motorists. John and Mary Kinner were among those who ran filling stations there. The Branding Iron Cafe sold a good ham sandwich for 48 cents, by Lavelett’s account; its building had begun as a saloon and become, in turn, a store, a post office and a church before it served sandwiches. Ralph Roder’s Harbor Inn stood on an acre of the site.

Ranches, a country club and an airfield

The biggest piece of the site was the Cathedral Rock Ranch, once Gov. Oliver H. Shoup’s, whose red-roofed buildings of stone and frame sat in a small bowl at the foot of the mountains. Lawrence Lehman and his wife had come from Chicago, where he had been with the Inland Steel Company, about 12 years before, and raised registered Angus on its 4,630 acres. When the Air Force decision came, she told the News: “Naturally, we are happy for the state, but we hate to leave. We love it here.” To the north, Cleo and Zelda Jack had run cattle on 480 acres since 1942. They had come from near Socorro, N.M., after the government bought their first ranch to make room for the atomic bomb, according to the Academy’s graduates’ association. The federal government bought them out twice.

South of the Lehmans lay the 1,520-acre Douglass ranch, owned by Nettie P. Douglass, and below that Pine Valley, the grandest address on the site. William A. Otis had bought much of the valley in 1888, including the Lennox house, to secure water for Colorado Springs and to experiment with cattle. In 1928 he sold what the Academy’s own history calls “the most important parcel” to A. E. Carlton, the “King of Cripple Creek,” for a house for his wife, Ethel Frizzell-Carlton, who hired Richard Requa of San Diego to design it in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. Carlton died in 1931 “before the house was finished and never lived at the Pine Valley estate, preferring the Broadmoor Hotel,” according to the Academy’s nomination of the house to the National Register. Ethel Carlton sold it in 1950 to Jack Valentine of Florida, who turned it into the Pine Valley Club, with a swimming pool and a small golf course. Around it were the Elkhorn Ranch, where a Marine officer, Lt. Col. Henry Leonard, bred horses; Earl H. Schwab’s Pine Valley Ranch; and the home of Loulie Albee Mathews, a collector of Bahá’í artifacts.

At Husted, Leo and Hertha Mohl kept a dairy, along with two businesses run from an outbuilding on the ranch: the Master Weavers of America and The Book Home, stocked with Leo Mohl’s collection of 40,000 books, according to the Pikes Peak Library District’s captions for the family’s photographs.

There was even an airfield. A landing strip at Pine Valley was already in use in 1927, and U.S. 85-87 “passed just feet from the end of the Pine Valley runway,” the railroad historian Mel McFarland wrote. On a tour of the site in August 1954, Harold Talbott, the Air Force secretary, relieved a sergeant at the wheel of a staff car and set off cross-country for Cathedral Rock. Sagebrush and boulders stopped him about a quarter of a mile short. That afternoon two of the Academy’s architects, John Merrill and Louis Skidmore, went to the Pine Valley Airpark, where an Air Force helicopter was waiting. The Air Force’s own files, as the News summed them up that June, described the land as “mostly privately owned ranchland, but includes several good suburban residences and a resort, the Pine Valley Club.”

Buying it

Colorado had prepared before it was asked. On March 23, 1954, the legislature created a three-man Land Acquisition Commission, gave it $1 million and the power of eminent domain, and authorized it to hand the land to the federal government “with or without compensatory payment.” President Eisenhower signed the bill creating the Academy on April 1. Colorado Springs was chosen on June 24. Gov. Dan Thornton said afterward that Talbott had told him the appropriation proved the state was fully behind the Academy. That summer readers mailed the News their ideas for a name for the Academy’s post office. One proposed “Colsted,” for Colorado Springs and Husted. Another proposed Falcon, which the first class of cadets would later choose as its mascot. The columnist collecting the entries, Robert L. Chase, had already decided that Husted would mean little to the Academy.

The commissioners were Arthur Sheely, a Fort Collins automobile dealer; Whitman Best, a Denver legislator; and Lawrence Trueheart, a right-of-way engineer for the state highway department. “We’ll have absolutely no trouble with land purchases,” Sheely said that June. Duke Dunbar, the attorney general, said about 17 or 18 property owners were involved. “We anticipate no difficulties,” he said.

The first purchase, in November 1954, was Lehman’s ranch, for $300,000. The Douglass ranch followed for $125,000, and with it, the News reported, “the academy will also acquire two graves along with the site unless Colorado arranges for disinterment of the bodies.” The markers bore the name Capps and the date 1885. The Pine Valley Airport went for $122,175 in January 1955.

The rest was slower. In March 1955 a committee of residents led by Wilton Cogswell Jr., a Colorado Springs dentist, complained to the governor that owners were told to accept the commission’s price or face condemnation. The commission’s policy was to offer the highest of three independent appraisals; it declined the governor’s request that it show owners the appraisals themselves, offering a written summary instead. Some owners were recent arrivals. One man bought 13.6 acres for $1,000 an acre on Aug. 1, 1954, five weeks after the site was announced. He turned down $400 an acre, and a court commission later awarded him $5,700 for land that had cost him $13,600. The American Machine and Foundry Company, which made secret products for the Defense Department at an 83-acre plant on the site, asked $1.25 million and agreed in August 1956 to sell for $327,500, the highest price yet paid for a single tract, according to the News.

The clay was last. A Pueblo brick company that owned 70 acres of clay deposits asked $750,000 for land the El Paso County assessor valued at $1,960. The commission offered $61,000 and went to court. “I’m not very good at figures,” the acting governor, Frank Hays, admitted, “but it does seem to me there’s quite a difference between $1960 and $750,000.”

Husted went quietly. In February 1956 the News found Jones General Store closed, with “a few boxes of cereal and a couple of cans of sauerkraut on the shelves,” and the station hut still reading “Husted, Elev. 6596. Denver, 62 miles, Ogden, 720 miles.” That July the Spring Valley correspondent of the Douglas County News reported that the town had been “sold one day last week for $55.25.” The same year the government paid $257,500 for the Elkhorn Ranch and $332,000 for the Schwab house.

What the Land Cost

Property	When	Acres	Price
Cathedral Rock Ranch (Lawrence Lehman)	Nov. 1954	4,630	$300,000
Douglass ranch (Nettie P. Douglass), with two Capps graves	Dec. 1954	1,520	$125,000
Pine Valley Airport	Jan. 1955	445	$122,175
Harbor Inn (Ralph Roder)	By April 1956	1	$68,000
Elkhorn Ranch	1956	—	$257,500
Schwab house, Pine Valley Ranch	1956	—	$332,000
American Machine and Foundry plant (asked $1.25 million)	Aug. 1956	83	$327,500
A lot bought for $13,600 in Aug. 1954, after the site was announced (court award)	Dec. 1956	13.6	$5,700
Clay tract of a Pueblo brick company (assessed at $1,960; owner asked $750,000)	In court, May 1957	70	$61,000 offered
All of it, from 159 owners	Expected, Jan. 1957	17,500	More than $4 million

What is left

The names stayed. The Academy’s ridges and valleys run, north to south, from Jacks Valley past Lehman Valley and Lehman Ridge to Douglass Valley and Pine Valley, and the planners put the Cadet Area on the high ground they called Lehman Mesa. Several houses survived by being promoted. The Carlton house became the superintendent’s residence, the Otis house the commandant’s and the Schwab house the dean’s, and the Elkhorn Ranch’s buildings became the Academy stables. The Pine Valley Club’s small golf course did not last. Talbott had promised in 1954 that the Academy’s own would be “one of the best in the world.”

The Burgess cabin, listed on the National Register as the Pioneer Cabin in 1975, still stands in Douglass Valley, the Academy’s marker says. When Falcon Stadium was built, the Capps graves were moved from near what became its 50-yard line to a small cemetery beside the cabin, dedicated on July 29, 1961. The Palmer Lake Historical Society, whose founding president was the Youngs’ granddaughter, placed a plaque there. The stone dam of the first Cascade Ice reservoir survived in West Monument Creek into the 2010s, though the 2013 floods damaged it, according to the historical society.

Of Husted, the historical society reported in 2018, a few remnants, mostly rubble, can be found near the north entrance. Several of its buildings were moved away and became private homes; in 2016 the Branding Iron was part of a house in Monument. The Reynolds ranch house, just east of the north gate on the grounds of the Western Museum of Mining and Industry, was by the society’s account the only building from the neighborhood still on its original site.

In February 1956 the News predicted that thousands of future officers would train at the Academy “and probably never know that Husted ever existed.” The Kinners, who sold their home there, hoped instead that it would be “like a monument to Husted and to all those that ever lived there.” The Academy’s marker on the walk to the chapel names Husted, Edgerton, the Teachouts and the Cathedral Rock Ranch.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: When the Black Forest Farmed Foxes (Oct. 14, 2026), which covers the West Husted fox farm · The Palmer Lake Historical Society Turns 70 (Oct. 3, 2026), on the society’s 1961 plaque at the Academy’s pioneer cemetery and the Young family · New Website Maps 534 Places in the History of the Palmer Divide (Oct. 12, 2026), on the map that places Husted and the Cascade Ice reservoirs.

The Academy’s own history: “Before the Academy” marker, as transcribed by the Historical Marker Database · USAFA history pages · National Register nomination, The Carlton House (prepared by the Academy’s historic preservation officer, 1989) · National Register nomination, Pioneer Cabin (William A. Burgess House) · National Historic Landmark nomination, U.S. Air Force Academy, Cadet Area (2003) · Association of Graduates Heritage Minutes: Pioneer Cabin, Jacks Valley.

The 1954 law and the purchase: Colorado General Assembly, Creating a Land Acquisition Commission (Session Laws 1954, 2nd extraordinary session, ch. 2) · Rocky Mountain News, via Colorado Historic Newspapers: June 4, 1954, June 16, 1954, June 17, 1954, June 26, 1954, Aug. 19, 1954, Aug. 21, 1954, Aug. 25, 1954, Sept. 1, 1954, Dec. 17, 1954, March 24, 1955, Feb. 19, 1956, Aug. 30, 1956, Dec. 21, 1956, Jan. 25, 1957, May 11, 1957 · Douglas County News, Jan. 20, 1955 and July 19, 1956.

Local history: Lucille Lavelett, Monument’s Faded Neighbor Communities and Its Folklore (1979) · Jack Anthony, “USAFA Before USAFA” essays, USAF Academy Class of 1975 website · Palmer Lake Historical Society, Cascade Ice Company and newsletters of 2016 and 2018 · Communities of the Palmer Divide (Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2011) · Pikes Peak Library District, Mohl Family Photographs (The Book Home) · Mel McFarland, “The real start of local aviation history,” Westside Pioneer, Feb. 21, 2015 · Palmer Divide Research, which maps Husted, the Cascade Ice reservoirs, Cathedral Rock and other places on the Academy’s land.

The 1820 and 1909 records: Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains (1823; Thwaites edition, Early Western Travels, vol. 15, 1905) · Colorado State Railroad Commission, Biennial Report 1909–1910, report on the Husted wreck.

Photographs: Willburk97, Pioneer Cabin 02 and Pioneer Cabin Cemetery Marker (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Trevor Cokley, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Air Force Academy aerial 2023 (public domain) · photographer unknown, Edgerton Hotel, Teachout Hotel (public domain); all via Wikimedia Commons

Methodology

The 1950s newspaper accounts come from the machine-read text of the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection, and every newspaper quotation used here was checked against the page image. Acreage is given as the sources gave it at the time: the Air Force spoke of 15,000 acres in 1954, the commission of 17,500 in 1956 and 1957, and the Academy’s 2003 landmark nomination gives 18,455. Later accounts of the 1909 wreck disagree on the death toll; this article uses the State Railroad Commission’s count of twelve. Lavelett’s 1979 history was compiled from residents’ recollections. Jack Anthony, a 1978 Academy graduate, drew his essays on the Youngs, the Lennoxes and the Kinners from their diaries, descendants and published accounts; Elizabeth Lennox’s words are quoted from her diary as he gives them. Palmer Divide Research is compiled by the editor of The Monument Independent. The maps place each site from the records named on them; sites known only to within about a quarter mile are drawn as hollow circles. The 1890s survey sheets were fitted to today’s coordinates and moved about 1,200 feet west to line up with today’s railroad, because the old sheets place features east of where modern maps put them.

Using this reporting? Credit The Monument Independent and link to this article: https://monumentindependent.com/news/before-the-air-force-academy-husted-edgerton/. Our guidelines are at Using Our Reporting.