Palmer Divide Research, a free website that went online this month, maps 534 places in the history of the high ground between Denver and Colorado Springs, from the stage stops of the 1860s to the fox farms of the mid-20th century. Each has a page with what is known about it and where that comes from. The site also lists 51 places it cannot yet locate, and asks residents to help find them.
The site, palmerdivideresearch.com, covers the Palmer Divide, the ridge of high ground between the South Platte and the Arkansas that runs east from the Rampart Range, mostly across Douglas, El Paso and Elbert counties. The site marks 399 of its 534 places as historic or vanished and 135 as living today. A click on any point brings up its history, and every place has its own page saying what is known about it, how its location was worked out and which sources say so. The site is free to use, and according to its privacy page it carries no advertising and sets no cookies of its own.
It is built to be added to. Most of what survives about the small places on the divide, the site says, is in family hands: letters, photographs, deeds, plat maps, school records and stories. A form on every place page sends corrections, notes and files to the site privately, and nothing appears on the site until it has been checked.
Visit Palmer Divide Research
What is on the map
Ranches and homesteads are the largest group, with 97 entries, many of them placed from their original federal land patents. Towns and settlements come next, with 65. The rest run from one-room schools, churches and cemeteries to the sawmills of the Pinery, cheese factories and creameries, ice ponds, fox farms, railroad stations and stage stops, and the forts and raids of the 1860s. Each kind has its own page and its own switch in the map’s key.
The page for Gwillimville is a fair sample. It describes a Welsh settlement at the head of West Cherry Creek, east of Monument, that had a cheese factory, a post office and a school by 1882 and had faded by about 1900. It places the settlement from the post-office site report filed in 1878 and sets that beside where Place Names of Colorado and Wikipedia put it. It also records that the schoolhouse was moved into Monument about 1930 and out to Highway 105 in 1985, where, the page says, the chamber of commerce still uses it as a meeting house. The page cites 27 of the site’s numbered sources.
A place goes on the main map when its location is reasonably sure, usually because two independent sources agree. Each point says how it was found, whether from a U.S. Geological Survey place-name point, a street address, a land-patent section or a written description, and how close it is likely to be. Places known from a single source sit in separate layers, off until switched on. The map can also show the Geological Survey’s topographic maps of the early 1890s beneath today’s roads, and the historic trails and stage roads that Glenn R. Scott traced on two maps the Survey published in 1975 and 1999.
Two limits are deliberate. Native American graves and artifact sites are shown only at the nearest named place, to protect them, and the site names people of the past, not the present owners of private property. Many of the places on the map are on private land today, and the site asks people to get permission before visiting.
How to contribute
The site asks for the kind of material archives tend not to hold. Its Contribute page lists what helps most. First are locations: where a house, school, mill, post office or grave stood, and how the sender knows. Then come corrections, with the source that shows them, and family history. Photographs of people, buildings, ranches and roads are wanted, and scans or phone pictures will do. So are plat maps, deeds and homestead papers, letters, diaries, school and church records, and photographs of artifacts with a local story.
Notes go through a form on every place page and on the Contribute page, or by email to [email protected]. A name and an email address are optional, and up to five files of 25 megabytes each can be attached. Notes are read privately. What checks out goes into the research and onto the site at the next update, credited by name, by initials or not at all, as the sender asks, and corrections are noted on the page they correct. Contributors keep the copyright in what they send. For anyone holding originals they might give up, the site offers to help find them a home in a museum or archive.
A separate page, Help us find these places, lists 51 places that turn up in post-office records, old newspapers and family histories but cannot yet be put on the map. Several are in the Tri-Lakes. One is the Elliott Store, a two-and-a-half-story frame store on Front Street in Monument that sold general merchandise, harness, plows and wagons from about 1880 and operated until 1963. The site knows the street but not the building, though the fire-insurance maps of 1895 and 1900 give it a likely candidate. Another is the McIntyre House, built about 1885 on Glenside Road in Palmer Lake and later a school and a community center; there, too, the site has the road but not the house. Two fox farms listed at Palmer Lake in a 1938 fur growers’ advertisement are on the list as well. A deed, a photograph with a landmark in it or a family story may be enough to place one, the page says.
Palmer Divide Research at a glance
The map: full-size map · all places, A to Z
Send what you know: the contribution form, or [email protected]
Places still to find: Help us find these places
Events: history events calendar
Downloads: research files · place data
Cost: Free; no account needed
A resource to share
The map is one part of the site. Its Research page offers 62 documents, maps and records, more than 17,000 pages in all, that anyone may download and reuse, nearly all of them in the public domain. They include gazetteers and state business directories from 1871 on, the Geological Survey’s topographic sheets of the 1890s, Scott’s trail maps and the reports of the state’s railroad regulators. There are also the site reports for 198 post offices in Douglas, Elbert and El Paso counties, bundled one file per office from National Archives microfilm. Most of those forms carry a postmaster’s sketch of the office, the creeks, the roads and the neighboring offices.
A Local History page lists the historical societies, museums, libraries and record offices whose work the research rests on, from the Palmer Lake Historical Society and the Larkspur Historical Society to the Pikes Peak Library District’s Regional History and Genealogy department. The site’s history events calendar gathers the talks, tours and meetings of 12 of those groups from their own calendars, checks them every morning and can be added to a phone or computer calendar. On Oct. 11 it listed 66 upcoming events, among them the Palmer Lake Historical Society’s 70th-anniversary evening at Palmer Lake Town Hall on Thursday, Oct. 15.
Every source the site uses has a permanent number, which the place pages cite; the Sources page lists 198. Recent local histories, among them Judy von Ahlefeldt’s Thunder, Sun and Snow (1979) and Lucille Lavelett’s booklets on Monument and its neighbors, are cited and quoted briefly but not reproduced. They are worth finding in a library, a museum or a bookstore. The place data itself can be downloaded as a spreadsheet or a mapping file and reused with credit under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
A link to the site shared on social media shows the card below, which is redrawn with the current counts at each update.
The site is refreshed every few weeks. The version online now was built from the research files on Oct. 11.
Sources & further reading
The Independent’s own coverage: The Palmer Lake Historical Society Turns 70 (Oct. 3, 2026), on the society whose anniversary evening is on the site’s calendar and whose books on Palmer Lake and Monument the site cites.
Palmer Divide Research: Home · Full-size map · About · Contribute · Help us find these places · Research files · Local history resources · History events calendar · Sources · Download the data · Privacy · Gwillimville
Organizations named: Palmer Lake Historical Society · Larkspur Historical Society · Pikes Peak Library District, Regional History & Genealogy · U.S. Geological Survey · National Archives
Methodology
Figures are as Palmer Divide Research displayed them on Oct. 11, 2026: 534 mapped places, 51 not yet located, 198 numbered sources, 62 research files and 66 upcoming events from 12 groups. The counts by kind of place are the site’s own. The split between vanished places and living communities is also the site’s, and the Independent confirmed it by counting the 534 rows of the site’s downloadable spreadsheet. All of these numbers change as the site is updated. What the article says about individual places, such as Gwillimville and the Elliott Store, is as the site reports it, with the site’s sources. The screenshots were taken by the Independent from the public site on Oct. 11. Palmer Divide Research is compiled by Michael Christensen, the editor of The Monument Independent, as a project separate from the paper.
