What we know
Barn built about 1874 by Peter Dumont of hand-hewn, pegged pine milled near Russellville; Asher Hilyen bought it in 1899 and named his 1,000 acres Rock Ridge Ranch; a rhyolite milkhouse of 1880. The ranch lay on the Old Post Road (1874) to Golddale and Franktown. State Register, 1994 (county map, S-0123, citing Appleby and the county landmarks program). The county landmark page (2000) has Peter DuMont's homestead filed in 1874, then the Case family (creamery, cheese factory, school, cemetery, post office), and the Hilyens owning the land from 1900 (not 1899) to 1970; the ranch house dates from about 1876 (S-0126).
Where it was
Pin on the Douglas County Historic Resource Map (DCHR-024; Douglas County and Douglas County Libraries, 2012, on the Larkspur Historical Society's Google map, S-0123). Where that map and ours place the same site, the pins mostly fall within about 300 feet. Good to a few hundred feet.
Placed from a written description, such as a land section, a distance from a landmark or an old survey note.
Sources
- S-0045: Larkspur Historical Society website (larkspurhistoricalsociety.org)
- S-0046: Douglas County Libraries, Archives & Local History: "Douglas County Timeline," "Douglas County Historic Sites," "Douglas County Schools Overview" (research collection PDFs 2, 7, 6)
- S-0123: Douglas County Historic Resource Map (Douglas County Community Planning and Sustainable Development, the Douglas County History Research Center of Douglas County Libraries, and the Douglas County Historic Preservation Board, 2012), as put on Google Maps and Google Earth by the Larkspur Historical Society
- S-0126: Douglas County Historic Preservation Board and Landmarks Program: landmark pages (2010-2022), board minutes and documents, the 2009 landmarks map and the 2010 Historic Resources map PDF (douglas.co.us, via the Wayback Machine)
Sources are named in the text above. Numbers such as S-0080 refer to our source list. Most newspaper quotations were read in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. Long quotations from recent books are shortened here.