What we know
Summer cabin of Joel Frederick Vaile, the D&RG's Denver lawyer and later its general counsel, from 1884 or 1885, built of slab wood above the Estemere with three partners whom the Vailes later bought out; Charlotte White Vaile wrote her children's books there. Their daughter Lucretia Vaile (1884-1976; died Oct. 27, 1976, per PLHS) gave her later home for the Vaile Hill Art Gallery (1969) and left the bequest behind the Lucretia Vaile Library-Museum (1981) (Sabin, S-0019, pp. 48, 101-03, 116, 128).
Where it was
122 Highland Road ('vaile cottage, 122 highland', survey B47, Freed & Barber, S-0101, p. 18), El Paso County address point (EPCPortalLocator2026, 2026-10-06).
A street address, located with the county's address points.
Sources
- S-0002: Palmer Lake Historical Society website (palmerdividehistory.org)
- S-0019: Marion Savage Sabin, Palmer Lake: A Historical Narrative, ed. Lloyd McFarling; 2nd ed. by Roger Davis; "Fifth Edition" (Palmer Lake: Palmer Lake Historical Society, 2019); first published Denver: Sage Books, 1957
- S-0101: Elaine Freed and David Barber, Historic Sites & Structures, El Paso County, Colorado ([Colorado Springs]: prepared for the El Paso County Land Use Department, [1977]), 56 pp., with the survey photographs in PPLD's Historic Sites and Structures collection
- S-0104: El Paso County GIS: address locators and parcels
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.