What we know
Ben Quick's stone ranch house, 7355 S. Perry Park Road. Quick came in 1860, lived at first in an old cabin six miles down the creek and settled here in the spring of 1861; his log house of that year later served as the barn, and the better house he built in 1867 was still in use as a dwelling in 1898. In 1885 he built the stone house of rock from the farm, with a stone fence of the same rock around the yard; by 1898 he owned 2,400 acres, nearly all in one body, irrigated from a reservoir built at a cost of $3,000 (PBR 1898, p. 443, S-0191). The building inventory record (S-0005) and a Larkspur Historical Society ranch history (S-0199) give 1884 for the stone house and call the stone rhyolite; PBR, printed in Quick's lifetime, and the 1983 county master plan appendix and Appleby (S-0123) give 1885. Work on his dike began in 1886 (S-0199). Fort Washington stood around his earlier house and barn. Quick died Feb. 2, 1915. About 1913 Earl and Elsie Tucker worked the place for his grandson, Ben Skelton; Andrew and Joe Nickson owned it for several years before R. P. Lamont of the Perry Park Ranch bought it, 2,024 acres, in August 1928 (Record Journal, Aug. 3, 1928), and Reginald Sinclaire bought it from Lamont in 1935, with 'the number one water right on Plum Creek' (S-0199). National Register Oct. 1, 1974, as the Ben Quick Ranch and Fort, at 6695 W. Plum Creek Road (S-0199). Clara Turner said in 1995 that Wallace Turner's family moved from Woodland Park to 'the Ben Quick place' about 1920, owned and farmed it, sold it, and took it back when the buyers could not pay, for perhaps six or eight years (DCL oral history doh/1067, S-0213). This does not fit the ownership sequence above and may concern part of the Quick land; not checked. Ben Quick started a school upstairs in his ranch house, a district by 1870 (Weber and Schlupp, ch. 11, p. 57; S-0262).
Where it was
NE1/4 SW1/4 of Sec. 13, T9S R68W, from the Colorado Historical Society building inventory record (Larkspur Historical Society site-survey binder 10, p. 5, S-0005); a 1978 deed for 45.85 acres in the W1/2 of Sec. 13 agrees (same binder, p. 110). The point is the center of that quarter-quarter on the BLM PLSS grid; the National Register's point for the Ben Quick Ranch and Fort is 0.13 mile away (S-0199). Good to about a quarter mile. On the 1937 county aerial photograph (sheet 145) the point falls in the ranch headquarters yard, among trees reached by a lane from the road (DCL aerials, S-0213).
Placed from a written description, such as a land section, a distance from a landmark or an old survey note.
Sources
- S-0005: Larkspur Historical Society, "Historical Site Survey Binders"
- S-0016: Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (coloradohistoricnewspapers.org)
- 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-0120: Bureau of Land Management, National Public Land Survey System (PLSS) data: CadNSDI section and quarter-section polygons, Colorado
- 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-0191: Portrait and Biographical Record of Denver and Vicinity, Colorado (Chicago: Chapman Publishing Company, 1898)
- 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-0213: Douglas County Libraries, Archives & Local History, digital archive (archives.dcl.org, CONTENTdm cdm17197): item records of all 15 collections
- S-0262: Tim Weber and Larry Schlupp, eds., Douglas County, Colorado: Prehistory to 2020 (Castle Rock: Historic Douglas County, Inc., 2022; first edition, printed by Amazon)
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.