AURORA | They wanted to bring Victorian class and culture to the untamed plains just east of Denver.
It’s clear in the layout and look of the Centennial House, a two-story home originally built on Hathaway Street (it’s called Galena Street now), just north of East Colfax Avenue. It’s refined beyond its exterior, though. Sure, there’s the home’s gabled roof, with its bright pink trim and echoing right angles. There’s the lure of the house’s sentimental wooden porch, which has been emptied of furniture for the winter months. Even still, the bare wooden porch is still plenty inviting on a crisp, cold morning — it offers a view of the street that’s unlike 99 percent of the other old homes on this strip mere blocks from the chaos and noise of East Colfax Avenue.
The appeal of the place is also in the home’s brightly painted blond brick and its elegantly curved and arched windows, and it’s there for those who make it past the front door. The narrow staircase with polished banisters, the cozy kitchen with its full sink and pot-bellied stove, the parlor with its high-backed piano. Still, the fanciness of this home isn’t only about appearance and decor.
It’s also about all the latest technological wonders of the late 1800s. There’s indoor plumbing, and that indoor plumbing goes all the way up to an upstairs bathroom. The coal furnace in the basement was included to keep that upstairs bathroom and the two neighboring bedrooms warm, however inefficiently. In those days, central heating was a new concept.
All of these features were luxuries when developer Donald Fletcher built the home in 1890. In fact, they were selling points that drove the price all the way up to $3,500, a pretty astronomical figure for the time. Along with the other homes in Fletcher’s first development in the town that bore his name, this building was an island of refinement in a stark and empty landscape miles away from civilization. It offered unspoiled views of the rugged plains with all of the modern conveniences of the city — for 1890.
That was when the first moving picture was introduced to the public. Now, movies about the 1890s are available instantly right in your home. Like so much of Aurora’s historic sites, this relic of the past now sits hidden among a modern, crowded and somewhat unremarkable suburban landscape.
The Centennial House is one of nine remaining homes from that first group of 14 in Fletcher’s development. The H.M. Miliken House, the Fuller House, the Robidoux House, all of these homes date from the same time and have the same Victorian feel as the Centennial House. They’re scattered down Galena Street, side-by-side with a hodge-podge of architectural styles that span more than a century.
Art Deco buildings from the 1920s, post-World War II homes built with speed and efficiency in mind, and run-down, cookie-cutter homes from the 1950s camouflage the Victorian home that’s listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
“Aurora’s history has been broken up into pieces,” notes Jim Bertolini, an assistant with the city’s Historic Sites and Preservation Department. “It’s hard to write a single narrative.”
If it’s hard to pick one historical trend from another on Galena Street, it’s even tougher to separate the bigger narrative of Aurora’s history in its 26 officially designated historic landmarks.
There’s no area in Aurora with as much concentrated history as Denver’s Capitol Hill. In Aurora, the concrete traces of the city’s past feel arbitrary. They stand out in stark relief on random fields amid tract homes and city buildings; they’re hidden in the glitzy, billion-dollar construction of the Anschutz Medical Campus.
There’s local history in a schoolhouse built in 1922 that’s been shuffled between three different sites around the city in the past 90 years. The building went up at what is now Cherry Creek State Park and was the school house for a fledgling community that included John and Jane Melvin. The couple’s school once hosted a restaurant for more than 20 years but now sits in front of Smoky Hill High School.
A dedicated group of preservationists helped save the building from destruction in the 1970s. They restored the interior to its original look as a frontier school house, and they worked with the Cherry Creek School District to find a permanent home for the building.
“It was worth saving,” says Garry O’Hara, president of the Cherokee Valley Historical Society. He’s standing in the central classroom of the Melvin building, surrounded by the wooden desks and looking to the chalkboard and presidential portraits of Lincoln and Washington on the wall. “We started the restoration in 1977, and it went until 1983. They gutted this place.”
O’Hara points to the details the society worked so hard to restore. The effort included digging inkwells into the desk tops, depressions where boys would dip girls’ pigtails. It’s in the carefully selected school library, a selection that includes hardbound copies of encyclopedias and titles in the “Junior Classics” series. It’s in the horseshoes in glass cases and the Big Chief tablet that sits on the teacher’s desk. The roots of this place creep from the black-and-white portraits of John and Jane Melvin, the settlers who lent the community its name.
Aurora’s history as a home for commuters is captured in another site that’s been moved between different places over the past 90 years. The city’s only mobile historic site is a trolley trailer that once ferried commuters up and down Colfax Avenue. Rediscovered in 2006, that refurbished trailer now sits locked away in a garage off East Sixth Avenue, awaiting a new permanent home in front of the Aurora History Museum.
Trolley Trailer No. 610 captures the story of Aurora and its spread-out physical history pretty well, according to Jennifer Kuehner, executive director of the Aurora History Museum.
“Aurora started as a satellite community,” Kuehner says. The city’s name, Aurora, came after Fletcher’s fortunes busted and he fled the city in shame. “Really, the trolley is part of Aurora’s earliest growth. The trolley system kept us connected to the rest of the area, even if we were in a rural environment.”
It’s not so tough to reconnect with those commuters, standing between the rows of seats and grasping the narrow wooden poles spaced out along the car. The darkness of the garage melts away, and the bustle of 1930s Colfax is easy to envision.
That has everything to do with the restoration. With its newly refurbished wooden seats and its signs warning commuters not to spit on the floor, the trolley shows little signs of its decades spent in a private home. When Aurora police officers discovered the car in 2006, it was part of a private house that had been built up specifically around the car.
Restoring the car became the passionate project of an army of volunteers. Dozens of workers put in thousands of hours of volunteer time to turn back the clock and recreate a piece of the city’s history. They worked to recreate a time when public transportation was a key part of making Aurora viable.
“They knew, in order to sell homes, they’d have to be able to provide transportation to the big city,” Kuehner says.
Long before Aurora grew into Colorado’s third-biggest city, it was made up of isolated communities and far-flung development. That’s the story in this two-car trolley, and that’s the narrative clear in the breadth of the sites designated by the city’s Historic Preservation Commission.
Homesteads and barns that date from the 1850s still stand at the Delaney Farm site off Chambers Road, right across the street from the Aurora Municipal Building. The homes on Galena Street speak to the city’s earliest days as a suburban refuge from Denver to the west.
The Aurora Fox theater on one of the busiest stretches of East Colfax Avenue is now one of the metro area’s busiest stages, but the Quonset hut structure opened in the late 1940s as a neighborhood movie palace. The military past of the Anschutz Medical Campus (once the Fitzsimons Army Hospital) survives in guardhouses and a former Red Cross Building.
The city’s Historic Preservation Commission has officially recognized these sites and others spread across the city. A limited number of those have found spots on the state and national registry of historic places. That leaves plenty of parts of Aurora’s past that remain officially unrecognized. Only a limited number of the Galena Street homes from the 1890s, for example, are officially designated. Others from the era of Donald Fletcher are privately owned and have no official designation.
It’s part of what pushed the city’s history buffs to declare Galena Street a historic district in the early 2000s. Despite the possibility of tax credits for restoration, local property owners weren’t convinced.
“That fizzled out because of lack of public support,” Jim notes. “We had to have property owners’ support to get something through the Preservation Commission and City Council.”
History, it seems, is easy to overlook, even if it’s hidden away in your own backyard.