When the Black Forest Farmed Foxes

For about twenty years the Tri-Lakes raised silver foxes for their fur, and the largest fox ranch in Colorado stood on land that is now Fox Run Regional Park and the Sanctuary Pointe neighborhood. Fashion, a wartime tax and cheap imports all but finished the trade within a few years of the Second World War, and the foxes went to the pelters, to other breeders and, now and then, to the woods.

Late in 1929 Ralph Holt of Colorado Springs came home from a hunt in eastern El Paso County with what he took to be the skin of a polecat. The fur company he took it to knew better. It was a silver fox, a female valued at $900, and marks on the pelt showed that she belonged to the Shelby fox farm in the Black Forest. The company paid Holt $100. The farm’s foreman said the vixen had slipped out of her kennel and stayed close by. Holt held that she had been loose long enough to count as a wild animal. It was, by any measure, an expensive polecat.

The farm belonged to G. Frank Shelby, a Denver church officer who had quit his post in 1928 to raise foxes, and it grew into the largest fox ranch in Colorado. For two decades it and at least a dozen smaller farms, from Larkspur to the Black Forest crossroads, raised foxes for capes, jackets and trim. Within a few years of the war nearly all were gone. The farmers said why at the time: women had turned to short-haired furs such as mink, Congress taxed the furs they still bought, Soviet pelts undercut American ones, and a fox had come to cost more to raise than its skin would fetch. The animals were pelted or sold to other breeders, and a few were let go. The big ranch became a Baptist camp, and part of its land became a county park that still carries the animal’s name.

The farms are mapped, with their sources, on Palmer Divide Research, and the places named below link to their pages there.

A fur that had to be farmed

A silver fox is a red fox in a dark coat, “dark all over, with silver hairs intermixed, but no red,” as an Agriculture Department bulletin put it in 1923, and trappers seldom caught one. Charles Dalton and Robert Oulton, hunting partners on Prince Edward Island, raised their first litter in pens in 1894. In 1910 Dalton sold 25 pelts in London for more than $20,000, when a farm hand on the island could expect to earn $320 a year: some sixty years of wages for one shipment of skins. By the fall of 1913, the department reported, six-month-old cubs of good stock sold for $11,000 to $15,000 a pair. The business soon crossed the border: American farms sold about 6,000 silver-fox pelts in 1923 and 170,000 in 1934.

Colorado came late and fast. The first silver foxes reached the state in 1920, when Wayne Light and his father brought two pairs to Steamboat Springs. For two years, by a later account in the Rocky Mountain News, they did not know that three of the four were “Sampsons,” foxes without guard hair and “utterly worthless.” As a fur business, it was a one-fox fox farm. A silver fox farm went up on Jarre Creek, west of Sedalia, in 1922. Julie Haverluk, who has researched the area’s fox farms, dates El Paso County’s first to 1921, at Fountain; in November 1922 the Gazette reported a silver fox farm near Fountain as a new industry for the county. Breeders formed a state association in 1925, renamed it the Rocky Mountain National Fur Growers Association in 1928, and ran a receiving house and a monthly magazine from Denver.

The Divide suited the animals. Shelby credited Colorado’s “high, dry and cool climate,” which he said spared foxes many diseases and grew a fine coat. The founders of the Larkspur farm chose a pine-covered south slope, prizing the shade for conditioning the furs. Judy von Ahlefeldt, the Black Forest’s historian, put it more simply: cool summer nights and cold winters made for thick coats. In 1932 there were 75 silver-fox ranches in Colorado, holding some 2,500 pairs. That May a United Press dispatch from Colorado Springs quoted “G. F. Selby,” as it spelled him, predicting that fox farming “would be one of the four greatest industries in the state in a few years.” The industry never came near the state’s top four; in 1938 the News put Colorado’s yearly output of farmed fox fur at $500,000 to $600,000. The state did make the industry’s top three: in the first census of fox farms, in 1940, Colorado ranked third in the country in silver-fox pelts, behind Wisconsin and Michigan, with 16,929 taken the year before on 139 farms.

The biggest ranch in Colorado

Shelby came to foxes from an unusual direction. Born in Baton Rouge and raised in Omaha and Denver, he had spent ten years as general secretary of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, an Episcopal church organization, before resigning in 1928 “to enter the fur farming business,” a career change his obituary recorded without comment. He chose land at the southern end of the Black Forest, east of Monument, for its scenery and its high, dry climate, and he built his herd by selling breeding pairs to buyers who then paid for the foxes’ keep at the ranch. In effect he sold foxes and charged their owners board. Around 1930 a breeding pair could sell for as much as $1,800. Under that arrangement, the News later reported, a pelt had to bring $50 for the ranch to make money.

For a while the ranch grew. Dave Gibbs, who had sold silver foxes for a Laramie company, was foreman by 1929. In 1935 the ranch advertised as far away as the San Luis Valley for horses and mules to feed its foxes, and that December a basketball team billed as the Monument Fox Farm played a double-header in Castle Rock. By 1937, a News columnist reported, it was the sixth-largest silver-fox farm in the country; by 1938 it held 4,600 foxes and about a thousand breeding pairs, including 238 white-faced silvers valued at $460 apiece, and was looking for a second site in Huerfano County. Lucille Lavelett, Monument’s historian, recalled eight units of pens, twelve houses for the year-round staff and 22 extra hands hired for three months of pelting each winter, when a veterinarian killed the foxes with an injection of Epsom salts. When a neighbor’s livestock died, the fox farm took the carcass for feed.

The arrangement did not last. Prices fell as production rose, and on Dec. 21, 1938, a federal judge in Denver placed the ranch in trusteeship to rearrange its finances, under the new Chandler Act, which, as the News explained, gave individuals the same reorganization privileges as corporations. Shelby died at Colorado General Hospital a few hours later, at 64. In 1939 a pelt brought $22, less than half what his scheme needed. The stockholders reorganized the business in 1941 as the Black Forest Fox Ranch, Inc., under C. L. Cole, a Denver broker, starting with a debt of $100,000; by 1948 it had seven directors and 190 stockholders. In June 1941 Melvin Dahl came from Genesee Mountain to run it; a Jefferson County paper called it the largest fur farm west of the Mississippi.

That September several foxes got out of their pens. Thomas Garrett, a 65-year-old hand, helped run one down, a chase of about five minutes uphill that left him pale, short of breath and holding on to a fence. He died of a heart attack seven weeks later. His widow and grandson sought compensation. Of six doctors who testified, two said the chase had brought on his death and four said it had nothing to do with it. The state Industrial Commission sided with the four, and in 1943 the Colorado Supreme Court, reversing a district judge, upheld its finding.

The corporation paid off its debt, bought more breeding stock and paid dividends for four years. In 1948 it kept about 2,400 animals on 1,240 acres in seventeen color phases, among them frosted silvers, glacier blues, “perlatinas” and platinums, names that would not look out of place on a paint chart, and it had scores of ribbons and plaques from the fox shows.

Horses at 50 cents a hundredweight

A fox farm ran on meat, with a surprising amount of fruit on the side. Von Ahlefeldt lists horsemeat, jackrabbits, figs, cereal and vegetables for the young foxes, and a growers’ advertisement of 1938 put the region’s yearly bill for cubed feed, cereal, horse and jackrabbit meat, tomatoes and figs at $2 million. In 1936 the Lincoln Fur Ranches at Larkspur offered 50 to 60 cents a hundredweight, live weight, for horses, and would come and get them. In 1941 Gibbs advertised, without elaboration, for “killer horses.” The war complicated the menu. Brewers used so many figs during the war, a Longmont fox farmer told the Colorado Rancher and Farmer in 1949, that for a time they were nearly impossible to get.

The smaller farms

Black Forest. Fox farms reached the Black Forest crossroads in the early 1930s, by the account of Vera Rusk Ellett, who grew up there. Wilkie Collins and Clarence Morrell started the Collins and Morrell farm in 1935 on the old Shoup Ranch just south of the crossroads, with about 150 foxes and some mink. They carried water from the creek in barrels and ground the meat with a shaft run from a Model A engine. The farm gave the two acres on which the Black Forest Community Church was built, and its wire pens could still be seen from the road in 1979. Phil Fishbeck’s farm, south of Shoup on Hering Road, bred black-silvers and developed a platinum-silver strain. Jim Perkins and Roy Barrett had a farm at Shoup and Hering. Dr. B. R. McCrory, who taught in Colorado State’s first course for fox farmers in 1936, left the veterinary faculty the next year to run a silver-fox farm in the Black Forest near Monument.

John Hanson’s farm, a mile south and four miles east of the Black Forest Store, near the west end of today’s Ayer Road, was still running in December 1949. On the evening of Dec. 17, 1949, fire destroyed its house and garage. Residents who had gathered at the community center for a Christmas program stood watch all night to keep it out of the trees. The pens and their roughly 75 kennels were spared, and 27 fox skins were salvaged from the burning garage. Hanson told the sheriff’s office he would be back in the morning to feed his foxes.

East of Monument. Gibbs later started the Gibbs Fox and Mink Ranch, three miles east of town. In early 1941 a William Brown of Monument and his wife had charge of it, and by 1942 the Gibbses were working a fox farm on Genesee Mountain while keeping the Monument place. About 1945 Bill and Esther Brown, probably the same couple, began building their own farm on the old Jackson place, near Roller Coaster Road. Their granddaughter, Marlene Brown, has written that they paid off the ranch in a year and bought her grandmother a Cadillac. By the figures later in this article, they got in at almost the last good moment.

Husted and Palmer Lake. Lavelett places a farm run by the Lairds and Hubert Scrivner at West Husted, near what she called, in 1979, the Academy picnic grounds. In Palmer Lake several fox farms were working in Sherwin Canyon in the 1940s. A 1938 growers’ advertisement lists two there, Orr Fur Farms and the E. M. Spalding Fox Farm, neither yet located. John and Hermina Kilgore farmed foxes in Palmer Lake in the 1940s, and Jack Duckels, later the state’s biggest mink rancher, kept turkeys and foxes near the town in the 1920s before moving to Aurora.

Charlie Orr’s fox farm led somewhere unexpected. Orr, a former engineer who had come out from New York, told the News in 1951 how he and his wife turned to rabbits. “Some of the foxes got so cute and tame and pet-like that Mrs. Orr just couldn’t bear to see them killed,” he said. So they took up angora rabbits, which are clipped rather than skinned. By 1951 the cooperative he founded in 1938 had 8,000 members, and its looms in Palmer Lake were the only ones in the country weaving angora cloth. Palmer Lake had acquired a textile industry because a fox farmer’s wife liked foxes. Orr stayed in Palmer Lake for the rest of his life, serving ten years on its planning commission and ten as a town trustee. The town declared his 100th birthday, Sept. 17, 1986, “Charlie Orr Day.” He died in 1988.

Larkspur. The Lincoln Fur Farm was built in 1928 and 1929 on 80 acres south of Larkspur, as the home ranch of a Denver company that also meant to raise rabbits, muskrats and mink. Its president, W. H. Hanks, had spent several years on a ranch near Palmer Lake before turning to silver foxes. It had steel-wire pens, underground kennels, a slaughterhouse and a watchtower, and E. V. McCullough ran it. The fur growers’ association held its annual meeting there that July. Wallace Turner, who went to work there in 1928 and was interviewed at 96, remembered barrels buried in the ground as cages for the first hundred foxes, and that he could kill twelve foxes an hour, at a dollar each. The road past it is still Fox Farm Road.

Why the market collapsed

The trouble started with success. Fur farms around the world were putting about a million silver-fox pelts a year on the market, the News reported in 1938, where the wild had once supplied a few hundred, and prices had fallen as production rose. Shelby had started at the top: the average American silver-fox pelt sold for $128.66 in 1928 and $31.57 in 1931, by the Agriculture Department’s figures. In 1939, fearing a flood of Canadian and other pelts once the war closed the London market, the United States limited silver-fox imports to 100,000 a year, 58,300 of them from Canada. A. H. Crow, who organized the growers’ association in 1925 and held stock in the Black Forest ranch, was credited at his death with getting the State Department to impose the quota.

The war added three blows. A federal excise tax on furs sold at retail, 10 percent of the price from October 1941 and 20 percent from 1944, added a fifth to the cost of a fur coat. During the war women grew used to untrimmed coats. And fashion turned from long hair to short: by 1949 the News‘s business editor dated mink’s rise to first place to four or five years earlier. The News explained the style in 1948: the modern woman “wants to look slim and svelte,” and on all but the tall and slender a long-haired fox fur made the wearer look dumpy. There is no import quota against dumpy.

Then came the imports. After the war the Soviet Union sold furs in quantity. The News put Russian fox pelts at about a third cheaper than American ones in 1948, and reported the next year that Russia had dumped “hundreds of thousands of fox pelts” on the American market. At a congressional hearing in Denver in 1950, breeders said fur imports had risen from $51 million a year before the war to $167 million. Costs moved the other way: labor doubled and feed doubled or tripled, and horses for meat grew scarce.

Cole’s pelts brought $60 in 1944 and $15 in 1948, against a cost of $26 to raise each fox; the table below follows the slide. In November 1948 the stockholders voted to liquidate. Nationally, the country’s roughly 3,000 fox ranches of 1944 were expected to be about 450 by 1949. Of some 325 silver-fox breeders in Colorado before the war, the News counted about six in July 1949.

Congress set aside $4 million for loans to fox farmers in 1948. The Farm Credit Administration, told to lend only on reasonable assurance of repayment, valued the farmers’ foxes at market price and approved one loan, for $73,000, while rejecting eighteen. Some Agricultural Department officials, a Scripps-Howard reporter wrote, said the silver-fox farmers were “in the same fix as were the makers of hoop skirts after hoop skirts went out of style.”

Local memory tells it more simply. Lavelett, writing in 1979, recalled that in 1946 “the United States made a trade agreement with Russia; Russia traded their furs to the U.S. for a metal we had to be used to harden steel,” and that “all the fur farmers had to get out of the business.” The Soviet furs were real and arrived in quantity, but none of the newspaper accounts read for this article mentions such a swap; they set the imports alongside the fashion, the tax and the feed bill. Washington did eventually act. In June 1951 Congress ordered the president to stop imports of fox and six other furs from the Soviet Union and Communist China. The ban took effect against Chinese furs at the end of that August, and in November Truman barred Soviet furs as well, by which time the Black Forest ranch had been a Baptist camp for more than a year.

What happened to the foxes

Pelting was the usual end. In December 1948 a News reporter found “hundreds of foxes … waiting for the executioner” at the Black Forest ranch, while the best breeders were being sold to other farms. The ranch’s equipment, trucks and building materials went at auction on Dec. 3, 1949. At Larkspur, near the end, the Lincoln farm sold 1,000 pelts held in a New York warehouse to pay the storage bill. When it closed in 1951, ten pairs passed with the land to the family who bought it, who thought they sold them to the Breitweisers’ Wellerwin ranch at Castle Rock, still in business.

Some went free. At the Lincoln farm, Danna Hamling writes in her history of the farm, now and then a pure black fox was born whose pelt had no value, and such foxes were released and “presumably bred with other wild foxes.” The Palmer Lake Historical Society’s fox-farm page, in a section drawn from Hermina Kilgore’s 1961 memoir, Rough Road in the Rockies, says the family’s breeding stock was pelted out, “with some foxes being released into the wild.” Others got out on their own, like Holt’s $900 “polecat” and the foxes rounded up at the Black Forest ranch in 1941; after Hanson’s fire, no one could say whether any had escaped.

Whether any of today’s red foxes on the Divide descend from those animals is another matter. Colorado has its own native red fox, a mountain subspecies. A 2017 genetic study that sampled foxes from the plains around Denver to the alpine country near Gunnison and Crested Butte found nonnative ancestry predominating in Denver and the lowlands, and native ancestry most common at high elevations. Later papers attribute much of that lowland ancestry to fur-farm stock, though a 2022 study cautioned that the genes alone could not tell farm foxes from wild ones that spread west from the plains. None of these studies looked at the Tri-Lakes in particular, so they leave open the suggestion on the historical society’s page that local foxes may descend from released farm animals. The local foxes are keeping their ancestry to themselves.

What happened to the land

The Divide’s biggest fox business had begun with a church officer, and it ended with a church camp. The Colorado Baptist State Convention announced in November 1949 that it was buying the Black Forest ranch, and the deal was set to close with a final payment on March 1, 1950. The price was $40,000, about a third of its $124,000 valuation. The Baptists got 1,240 acres, thirteen cabins, an office and a two-story cement building “originally used to skin fox and mix feed,” which became the camp’s kitchen and dining hall. The first campers arrived on July 23, 1950. As this paper reported in June, the camp gave Baptist Road its name, and its grounds were later annexed by Monument and built over as Sanctuary Pointe. In 1986 El Paso County opened Fox Run Regional Park, 417 acres by the county’s 2006 count, on what Haverluk says were 390 acres bought from the Baptists.

The rest is scattered. Fox Farm Road keeps the Larkspur farm’s name, though the land is private. The Black Forest Community Church was built on Collins and Morrell’s two acres. Palmer Divide Research lists seven Tri-Lakes fox farms it cannot yet place, and asks anyone with a deed, a photograph or a family story to get in touch. The Palmer Lake Historical Society’s museum listed fox farms among its exhibits in 2019. Its glass display cases came from a furrier who was going out of business.

As the ranch wound down in December 1948, Cole told the News he hoped to sell to another fox farmer. Failing that, he thought the cottages would make “a desirable dude ranch or summer camp.” “We have every confidence that fox furs will come back to their own in a few years,” he said, “but we feel it best not to wait.” He was right about the camp.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: The Road That Lost Its Baptists (June 14, 2026), on the camp that followed the fox ranch and the subdivision that followed the camp · New Website Maps 534 Places in the History of the Palmer Divide (Oct. 12, 2026), on the site that maps these farms · The Palmer Lake Historical Society Turns 70 (Oct. 3, 2026), on the museum and its fox-farm exhibit.

Palmer Divide Research: Fox and fur farms · Places not yet located · Black Forest Baptist Assembly.

Newspapers, 1929–1951 (Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection): the $900 “polecat,” Walsenburg World, Dec. 3, 1929 · Lincoln Fur Ranches at Larkspur, Record Journal, March 15, 1929 · 75 fox farms in Colorado, Rocky Mountain News, May 29, 1932 · the 1936 feed advertisement, Record Journal, May 8, 1936 · 4,600 foxes, World-Independent, July 13, 1938 · Colorado’s fur industry, News, Dec. 7, 1938 · Shelby’s death, News, Dec. 22, 1938 · Dahl moves to Monument, Jefferson County Republican, June 5, 1941 · “Style Shifts, Soviet Shenanigans,” News, Dec. 18, 1947 · the vote to liquidate, AP, News, Nov. 18, 1948 · “Vanishing Americans Include Fabulous Fox Fur Farmers,” News, Dec. 5, 1948 · “Plight of Silver Fox Farmers,” News, Dec. 9, 1948 · Colorado’s fur farmers in 1949, News, July 12, 1949 · the Baptist purchase, News, Feb. 6, 1950 · the 1950 House hearing, News, May 28, 1950 · a Longmont fox farm’s feed, Colorado Rancher and Farmer, March 26, 1949 · the ban on Soviet furs, United Press, News, Nov. 24, 1951 · Charlie Orr’s angora cloth, News, May 20, 1951. Also: “Colorado Baptists Purchase Black Forest Ranch for Camp,” Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph, Nov. 26, 1949, p. 1, and “Black Forest Ranch Buildings Leveled by Fire,” Colorado Springs Free Press, Dec. 18, 1949, p. 1 (Pikes Peak Library District, Pikes Peak NewsFinder).

Court and county: Black Forest Fox Ranch, Inc. v. Garrett, 110 Colo. 323 (1943) · El Paso County Parks, Fox Run Regional Park Master Plan Update (2006).

Local histories: Lucille Lavelett, Monument’s Faded Neighboring Communities and Its Folklore (1979; Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2026), pp. 68 and 72 · Judy von Ahlefeldt, Thunder, Sun and Snow: The History of Colorado’s Black Forest (1979), pp. 92–93, 101 · Vera Rusk Ellett, Growing Up in Black Forest (1990), pp. 65–66 · Marion Savage Sabin, Palmer Lake: A Historical Narrative, 5th ed. (2019), pp. 112 and 137 · Danna Hamling, “Lincoln Fox Farm,” in the Larkspur Historical Society’s Perry Park binder · Nita Adkins Castillo, history of the Black Forest Baptist Assembly (2014) · Marlene Brown, “History of fox farming recounted,” Our Community News, April 2026 · Palmer Lake Historical Society, “Fox Farms Around the Palmer Divide”, which reprints Danny Summers’s article in the Castle Rock News-Press of March 13, 2011, and passages from Hermina Kilgore’s Rough Road in the Rockies (1961).

The wider industry: Parks Canada, Pioneer Fox Farming National Historic Event · Heidi MacDonald, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Charles Dalton and Robert Oulton · Ned Dearborn, The Domesticated Silver Fox, USDA Farmers’ Bulletin 795 (1917) · Frank G. Ashbrook, Silver-Fox Farming, USDA Bulletin 1151 (1923), and Fur Farming in Perspective (1936) · Fish and Wildlife Service, “2,655 Silver Fox Farms in U.S., Census Shows” (Jan. 13, 1942) · Canada Year Book 1946, pp. 286–287 · Revenue Act of 1941, 55 Stat. 718, and Revenue Act of 1943, 58 Stat. 61 · Trade Agreements Extension Act of 1951, sec. 11, 65 Stat. 75.

Photographs: all from the Rocky Mountain News, via the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection: Nov. 6, 1927 (the fox-show spread), Dec. 5, 1948 and May 20, 1951.

Red fox genetics: Merson et al., “Distribution of native and nonnative ancestry in red foxes along an elevational gradient in central Colorado”, Journal of Mammalogy (2017) · Cross et al., “Red Fox Ancestry and Connectivity Assessments Reveal Minimal Fur Farm Introgression in Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem”, Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management (2018) · Quinn et al., “Contrasting genetic trajectories of endangered and expanding red fox populations in the western U.S.”, Heredity (2022).

Methodology

Most of the dated facts here come from Colorado newspapers of 1929 to 1951, read in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. That archive’s text is produced by machine from page scans and garbles names and figures, so every newspaper passage quoted in this article, and every figure in the table, was checked against the page images. The 1932 dispatch printed Shelby’s name as “Selby”; the initials, the business and the dateline match. The local histories by Lavelett, von Ahlefeldt and Rusk were compiled from residents’ recollections between 1976 and 1990 and are cited as such; where they disagree with the newspapers on dates, names or places, the newspapers are followed. They put the start of the Black Forest ranch in the early 1930s, for instance, where the newspapers show it running by 1929 and two 1948 accounts date it to 1928; von Ahlefeldt calls its owner “Dr. Frank Shelby” and places it on Ayer Road, where the papers put G. Frank Shelby’s ranch east of Monument. Lavelett’s figure of 200,000 furs shipped in 1937 is left out, because the ranch held about 4,600 foxes in 1938. A 2026 account of a talk that put “over 75” fox farms in Douglas and El Paso counties in 1932 is also not used: a United Press count that year gave 75 for the whole state. Accounts of Fox Run Regional Park’s start differ, giving 1986 or 1987 and 390, 410 or 417 acres; the article uses the county’s own 2006 figures and gives Haverluk’s 390 acres as hers. Dollar figures are as reported, without adjustment for inflation. The photographs are taken from the archive’s scans of the Rocky Mountain News and trimmed to their printed borders; the white streak across the 1948 cape photograph is in the scan. The article names no current owner of any former fox-farm property. Palmer Divide Research is compiled by Michael Christensen, the editor of The Monument Independent, as a project separate from the paper; the article links to it as a map of the places, and the facts rest on the documents listed above.

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