What we know
Henry Harper Curtis and Julia Paddison Curtis came from Wales and Australia with nine children in 1871, homesteaded 160 acres and bought 240 more; cattle, turkeys, horses, dairy, grain and potatoes. Named for the scrub oak. Colorado Centennial Farm, 1996 (county map, S-0123). H. H. Curtis was master of the Pleasant Valley Grange (No. 33). Stewart family histories call it the Oakland Ranch, north of Wolfensberger Road (Larkspur Historical Society files, S-0199).
Where it was
Pin on the Douglas County Historic Resource Map (DCHR-039; 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. A 2010 family guide gives the ranch's address as 1613 N. County Highway 105, which apparently fits this pin's position along the road (S-0199).
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-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
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.