What we know
Frederick and Charles Doepke, from Austria, homesteaded here in 1861 and ran a dairy into the 1950s, with wheat, oats, corn and hay. Their two-story brick farmhouse of 1881 is built of bricks the brothers made from the ranch's own clay, on rhyolite foundations; the house was a gathering place for Lake Gulch's German community. Douglas County landmark, 1999 (county map, S-0123).
Where it was
Pin on the Douglas County Historic Resource Map (DCHR-030; 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
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.