Discover The Lucas Homestead
At
Castlewood Canyon State Park
Castlewood Canyon State Park
2989 S. Highway 83
Franktown, CO 80116
303-688-5242
www.parks.state.co
Sketch by Bob Metzler, grandson of Patrick and Margaret Lucas
www.castlewoodfriends.org
The Lucas Homestead is located on the west side of
Castlewood Canyon State Park. To visit it, turn south on
Castlewood Canyon Road which is 1/2-mile west of the intersection
of Highways 83 and 86 in Franktown. Travel 2.1 miles to the
Homestead Parking Lot on the east side of the road. The lot is
1/10-mile past the park entrance station.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Bob Metzler, grandson of Patrick and Margaret Lucas, and
John Ames, who fished in Cherry Creek near the Lucas Homestead as a young boy,
for sharing their memories with us and helping us recreate the story of this historic
property.
We also wish to thank Castlewood Canyon State Park volunteers Susan Permut and
Linda Pohle for their assistance with this booklet.
Ron Claussen, Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO) Interpreter, ably directed the
project.
The park is grateful to Bruce Papich and Lynda Lou Greeley of the Toyota Denver
Region Sales office who helped organize Toyota's participation in National Public
Lands Day. They and 80 colleagues built and performed maintenance of the Lucas
Homestead trail.
Brice Foland of Pioneer Sand & Gravel for their donation of trail material for the
new segments of trail and trail maintenance.
Friends of Castlewood Canyon State Park for their generous financial support.
Now walk back toward the spring house until you see, on your right, one of the
most remarkable, and mysterious, structures on the homestead—a concrete, six-foothigh, L-shaped wall embedded with beautiful rocks. We call it the “fancy wall.”
Notice the bolts on the top of the wall. Those suggest something might have been
nailed to the top to create a roof over the two-sided structure, creating a shelter. Milk
cows are valuable property and dairy farmers today play music for their cows and
paint their barns and milking parlors in pleasant colors. Do you think the Lucases
built this wall to please their cows and give them a particularly fine shelter?
The tour of the Lucas homestead ends here, but, as you walk back to the concrete
house, we invite you to imagine what life might have been like on the homestead
over 100 years ago.
Imagine…
It’s four a.m. at the start of a cold winter day in 1900. The
fire in the only source of heat in the home had burned down overnight. Brrr! But the
rooster is crowing and it’s time to get up. The first Lucas family members up
restarted the fire in the kitchen stove. Lacking flashlights, Patrick and his sons, who
were responsible for the outside chores, dressed warmly, grabbed kerosene barn
lamps, and headed outside to feed the animals, milk the cows, store the milk in the
spring house, gather eggs, and do countless other chores. Margaret and her daughters
put on water for tea and had a hot, hearty breakfast ready when the boys returned
from their early morning chores about 6 a.m.
Now that it’s light outside and everyone has their inner fires stoked by a hot
breakfast, there’s still more work to do…perhaps dig out from a recent snowstorm,
split wood, tend to the animals, carry milk to the Franktown creamery to sell. In the
spring and summer there was even more work—cultivating, weeding, and irrigating
the fields. So, do you think these were the good old days?
Patrick Lucas died in the concrete house in 1936 and Margaret moved to Denver in
1941. The concrete house was never lived in again. Fire swept the property in the
late 1950s/early 1960s. The homestead acres were divided up over the years. In
1979, Colorado State Parks began purchasing the homestead from Lucas grandson
Bob Metzler and his sister Rosemary, who wished to honor the memories of their
grandparents. The final acres were purchased in 2002 by Friends of Castlewood
Canyon State Park. For more information about this historic homestead, visit the
Castlewood Canyon State Park Visitor Center and ask to look at the Discover Book,
which contains detailed information about the park’s geology, history, flora, and
fauna.
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Discover the Lucas Homestead: A Self-Guided Tour
Patrick and Margaret Lucas were born in Ireland, but met and married in Arizona in
1889. In 1894, they were among the area’s first homesteaders, settling 160 acres on
this site in the park. By 1910, they had eight children, ranging in age from 3 to 18.
Some evidence of the family’s presence is obvious, like the two-story concrete
house before you. Other evidence is harder to find…and is still being found. Be
sure to bring your imagination along on this approximately half-mile walk around
the Lucas homestead and back in time. If you do happen to find an artifact, please
leave it where you found it and notify park staff. Thank you for helping us protect
the story of the Lucas Homestead in Castlewood Canyon State Park.
We begin at the front of the concrete house. The Lucases built a wooden house
near this site when they first homesteaded here in 1894. Four years later, in 1898,
they built this concrete house. A concrete house was unusual in those days, so why
did they choose concrete? Perhaps Patrick and Margaret were thinking of the stone
and plastered concrete houses in their native Ireland. Patrick also spent time in
Illinois where concrete houses were more common.
Look closely at the house for clues as to how the Lucases lived. Do you see any
electrical wires or places to attach electrical wires to the outside? Do you see any
signs of water pipes that indicated they had indoor plumbing? How many chimneys
are there? Can you spot the place where the stovepipe from the wood-burning stove
attached to the chimney? Note that there is only one stovepipe attaching point with
no attachment point higher up on the wall. That probably means there was only one
stove to heat the whole house and no source of heat upstairs. This was not unusual
for ranch houses in those days.
See the wide ledge on the north and south sides of the interior walls at ground-floor
level? Look for a smaller ledge higher up on the walls, above the windows. Floor
joists were placed on these ledges. The bottom ledge supported the floor of the first
floor and ceiling of the cellar. The top ledge supported the second floor and first
floor ceiling.
Now look around the outside of the house. See the small bushes growing in a circular
pattern to the right (south) side of the house? These are snowberries, which often
grow in disturbed ground. Lucas grandson Bob Metzler remembers a large mulberry
tree growing on this spot with tables and chairs arranged underneath it. It would have
been a lovely spot for taking afternoon tea and meals and entertaining in warm
months. The Lucases reportedly liked to entertain and did so often. Continue around
the south side of the house. The curved concrete roof marks the entrance to the
cellar. A concrete cellar would stay cool in summer and warmer in winter. What
types of food do you think the Lucases would keep here?
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Across from the southeast corner of the house, notice the larger bushes in the scrub
oak. These are Margaret’s beloved lilacs. Women typically planted lilacs around
their new homes—perhaps as a reminder of the homes they left behind. Down the
hill from the lilacs, a bit treacherous walking, is the well, still marked by a ceramic
pipe in the ground. A stream begins here, probably the source of water for mixing
concrete for the house and for drinking and cooking.
Go back down to the lane and turn right, walking towards the next stop. On the way,
look at all the weeds. When you have milk cows, it’s extremely important to remove
weeds so the cows don’t eat them. Weeds can give milk a bad taste, and one weed
that grows here, poison hemlock, is a very bad thing to have in milk.
Now move around to the left (north) side of the house. The big tree is a box elder.
The smaller trees down the hill from it are apple trees the Lucases planted over 100
years ago for fruit for apple pies, cobblers, perhaps cider. These are apple varieties
you won’t find in grocery stores today. These may have been purchased as young
saplings from the Lambert Orchard Company in Sedalia, which was in business
when the Lucases began homesteading. Despite their age, these trees continue to
bear fruit in the fall. Patrick and Margaret would be pleased!
yards down the trail? Don’t go too far or you’ll get your feet wet in water from a
spring that begins about 20 feet up the hill and to the right of this structure. This
building was the Lucases’ spring house. It served as their refrigerator. A trough in
the middle of the structure would direct water from the spring into the spring house
and the milk jugs would be placed in the water each morning to keep the milk fresh.
An outlet downhill allowed the water to flow out of the spring house, ensuring there
was always clean, fresh water. A wooden roof covered the spring house and thick
wooden walls filled with sawdust insulated it, protecting milk and food from heat
and cold. Can you imagine how tasty a watermelon would be on a hot summer day
when it came out of that cool water? The Lucases may have had more milk than they
could use, so they loaded some milk cans on wagons to sell at a creamery that was
then operating in Franktown.
Go back towards the parking lot and bear left at the trail junction to see some of
the surviving outbuildings of the Lucas homestead. As you enter the trees and scrub
oak a few yards down the trail, look for a wood structure in the scrub oak on your
right. This was the Lucases’ livestock loading chute. The height of the chute’s sides
provide a clue as to what kinds of animals the Lucases kept. So does the fence post
with barbed wire on it just across the trail on your left. It’s a kind of wire used for
tall animals like cattle and horses. The Lucases would have had horses to pull their
wagons. They would back the wagon up to the loading chute and drive cattle into the
wagon.
Look for a large, iron ring, or “eye,” sticking up in the grass about 20 feet in front of
the loading chute. The Lucases probably tied their horses to this ring to prevent them
from straying off to graze while cattle were being loaded in and out of the wagon.
Just past the chute, walk up the slight incline on your right. See the concrete
“floor”? What do you notice about it? There are rectangular troughs in the floor and
curved troughs on each side with some bolts and wood visible on one side. This was
probably the milking parlor area of a large barn. Wooden stocks held the cows’
heads while they were milked and as they fed on hay in the curved troughs, called
mangers. There’s dark, rich dirt in the rectangular troughs now, which suggests that
they once held cow manure. It’s important to keep a milking parlor clean and the
troughs would have made it easy to “muck out” the parlor after each milking. The
Lucas boys probably did the milking, being careful to watch out for swishing tails,
especially in the winter when dirt frozen on the ends of those tails would make them
dangerous!
Milk was poured through strainers into large cans for storage. Where would the
Lucas boys take the full, perhaps 5- to 10-gallon cans to keep the milk fresh? To a
refrigerator? Well, kind of, as you’ll see in a minute.
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Have you spotted the concrete walls on the right (south) side of the path a few
Continue down the hill to the next building on our tour—a large (75 feet long
and 36 feet wide) concrete structure. This building has some puzzling features. It
looks big enough to be a barn, but there are no bolts sticking up from the low walls,
suggesting that there was never a roof over it. What else could this be? Maybe it was
a silage pit to sweeten hay before feeding it to the stock or to sweeten manure before
spreading it on the fields? “Sweetening” means letting the hay or manure ripen and
decompose before using it. Manure spread on the field too soon would burn crops.
Lucas grandson Bob Metzler recalls this structure as a hay stacking yard, where he
saw hay stacked high in haystacks that looked like giant loaves of bread!
Find the bedspring near the south wall of this structure. John Ames, who came to
Castlewood Canyon to fish in the 1910s and 20s, told us that Patrick used to tie three
old bedsprings together and stretch them across the road as a tollgate. He would
charge 25 cents for cars to cross his property.
Behind you, next to the Homestead Trail, is some stout, square, non-barbed wire.
This gives us a clue as to what other animals the Lucases raised. We call this “hog
wire.” Why do you think it’s called that? Because it was used to fence hogs (pigs)
in…and to keep them out of the crops and stored hay. The family raised pigs for
food, including pork roasts, sausage, ham, and bacon. They may have sold some pigs
to generate income for the family. We’ve found chicken wire on the homestead, too,
north of the house. Guess what that would be used for?
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