What we know
Carlson and Frink's creamery; P. C. Hagedorn and his sons Bryan and Marion ran it from 1911 to 1917, when selling milk and cream was the farmer's only cash income before harvest (S-0011). In the blizzard of 1913 Melvin Olson and his brother broke a trail through five-foot drifts so the milk wagons could reach the Monument creamery; it took three days, with 20 other wagons following (Olson's obituary, May 12, 1983; S-0199). Andrew and Florence Cobel, later operators, made 'thousands of pounds of Black Diamond cheese every year', and the creamery shipped several loads of milk a day by rail (S-0021, p. 35, with a photograph of the 'MONUMENT CREAMERY'). Clarence B. Frink's 1918 sketch lists Monument among the company's branch creameries, run from Larkspur (Stone, S-0193, vol. 4 p. 406).
Where it was
'Site of the Monument Creamery', 366 Second Street (PLHS walking tour, S-0235), El Paso County address point (EPCPortalLocator2026, 2026-10-14). Lavelett: 'It was located just east of the Santa Fe tracks and at the time was located at the east end of Second Street' (Through the Years at Monument, S-0011, p. 89), which fits. Good to about 100 feet.
A street address, located with the county's address points.
Sources
- S-0002: Palmer Lake Historical Society website (palmerdividehistory.org)
- S-0011: Lucille Lavelett, Through the Years at Monument, Colorado: The Story of Monument, Colorado, 5th printing (Palmer Lake: Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2004); first published Colorado Springs: Valliant Press, 1975
- S-0021: Palmer Lake Historical Society, Communities of the Palmer Divide (Arcadia Publishing, March 2011)
- S-0104: El Paso County GIS: address locators and parcels
- S-0193: History of Colorado, illustrated, vols. 2-4, biographical (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1918 [vols. 2-3] and 1919 [vol. 4]), the set edited by Wilbur Fisk Stone
- S-0199: Larkspur Historical Society, the document store behind its "LHS Search Agent" (larkspurhistoricalsociety.org/resources/lhs-search-agents/): 362 files, about 810 MB, uploaded April–June 2026
- S-0235: Palmer Lake Historical Society, "Palmer Lake Walking Tour" and "Monument Walking Tour" web pages (palmerdividehistory.org, about 2020-2023; removed; Internet Archive captures)
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.