What we know
Monument's annual Potato Bake, a free barbecue and show of Divide farm produce, was held here from 1890. The Divide Potato Bake and Barbecue Association was formed in the autumn of 1889, but its first bake, set for early November, was snowed out (Rocky Mountain News, Oct. 25 and Nov. 2, 1889, and Sept. 23, 1891, S-0229). The first bake was held on Oct. 10, 1890, 'just west of the town on a rolling tract of ground', with a speakers' stand, a pyramid of Divide produce, roasting pits and the Mount Herman band; the News called it 'the first potatoe bake that ever occurred in Colorado' (Oct. 11, 1890). Gov. John Routt came to the 1891 bake on Sept. 22. At the 1892 bake, on Oct. 5, the News estimated 7,500 people were served, seven Divide postmasters held a reception, and visitors plied the dam's contractor, McShane, with questions about the new lake. At the 1893 bake, on Oct. 5, Dora Phelps Buell of Denver spoke for equal suffrage, a month before Colorado's men voted it in (News and Pueblo Chieftain, Oct. 6, 1893). Bakes were still held in October 1917 (Record Journal of Douglas County, Oct. 12, 1917). Later accounts differ on the start: Weinfeld and Howe (S-0183) follow the association's 1891 statement that 1890 also failed, but the News reported the 1890 bake in full, and Case (S-0110) puts the start in the 1880s. R. J. Gwillim is credited with beginning it (S-0192), while the News in 1892 called O. P. Jackson 'the originator'. 'East of Monument Lake' describes the place as it later looked: in 1891 Jackson told the crowd that Monument was 'soon to have nestled at her feet a very large lake'.
Where it was
The 1891 bake's barbecue pits were 'a hundred yards west of the depot', and its tables, platform and seats 'a hundred yards south of the pits' (Rocky Mountain News, Sept. 23, 1891, S-0229); measured from the Rio Grande track beside Second Street, where the depot stood (see the Monument D&RG depot), in OpenStreetMap. Lavelett puts the bake 'west of the Rio Grande tracks and east of Monument Lake' (S-0011), and the Palmer Lake Historical Society 'just across the tracks from Front and Second Streets' (newsletter, 2014, S-0002); at Second Street the track and the lake's east shore are about 860 feet apart. 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-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-0016: Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (coloradohistoricnewspapers.org)
- S-0103: OpenStreetMap extracts via the Overpass API (2026-10-05)
- S-0110: Linda Saulnier Case, "Monumental Happenings and Histories" (The Tribune, 2018–2019), part of S-0108
- S-0183: Michael Weinfeld and John Howe, Shootouts, Killings, and War Heroes: The History Hidden in Monument's Cemetery (Westcliffe, Colo.: Filter Press, 2024)
- S-0192: Portrait and Biographical Record of the State of Colorado (Chicago: Chapman Publishing Company, 1899)
- S-0197: Susan E. (Steppler) Koch, The Land Is In My Blood: The History of The Divide Country and Its Pioneers, complete with Driving Tour and Homestead Maps (self-published; copyright 2015, U.S. Copyright Office TXu 2-251-186; first printing 2008, second October 2015, this copy the third printing, fall 2018)
- S-0229: Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection: the Monument Potato Bake, 1889-1917, sweep of 2026-10-14 (via S-0016)
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.