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Photo postcard of Borgmann’s Brown Cabin Café and Wee Nook Art and Novelty Shop, Evergreen, CO, ca. 1920’s.

The Brown Cabin Café was owned and operated by Herman and Elizabeth (Williams) Borgmann, both natives of Missouri.  Herman and “Betsy,” as she was called, were married in Kansas City, MO, on June 29, 1893.  By 1905, they were the parents of a daughter, Frances, and a son, Carl.   While in Missouri, Herman worked as a dry goods salesman. 

Sometime between 1905 and 1910, the Borgmanns moved to Colorado, where Herman worked at the Crockett and Moody dry goods store in Greeley.  Then, sometime after 1910, the Borgmann’s moved to Denver, where Herman was a candy salesman.   In 1913, the Borgmanns’ daughter, Frances, graduated from Colorado State Teachers College and was subsequently employed as a teacher.  Around 1919, the Borgmanns moved to Evergreen and acquired or established the Brown Cabin Café.  The Wee Nook Art and Novelty Shop was most likely not established until 1923 or after and would be operated by the Borgmanns’ daughter, Frances.   Their son, Carl, attended the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Frances married Donald Gilbert Worley in a ceremony in Denver in June of 1925.  Sadly, she would pass away just three years later at age 34.

In 1926, two articles in the Jefferson County Republican newspaper indicate that the Borgmann’s operated a hotel in Evergreen as well.  A September 9th article reported that “Mr. Borgmann” would provide room at the “Evergreen hotel” for a construction crew of about 40 men who would be building a significant addition onto the Troutdale hotel, adding that Borgmann  had closed the Brown Cabin café for remodeling to be done during the winter.  A second article dated November 25th reported that “an oyster supper was served at the Borgmann hotel” in connection with a charitable event.   

In 1930, Mr. and Mrs. Borgmann moved to nearby Bergen Park, located about 5 miles north and west of Evergreen.   There they would open up a lodge, formerly known as the Round Up Inn.    In addition to the lodge proper, they would operate a service station and 15 camp cottages. 

By 1946, the Borgmann’s had retired and moved to Boulder, where their son Carl, his wife, Mabel, and their growing family lived.  Carl was a high achiever.  Having graduated from the University of Colorado in 1927 with an engineering degree and following a stint with Bell Labs in New York City, he earned a PhD at Cambridge and did post-doctoral work at the University of Stockholm.  In 1934, he obtained an assistant professorship at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, followed by approximately two years of employment as a research scientist with the National Tube Steel company in Pittsburgh.  In 1938, Dr. Borgmann was hired as head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Colorado and eventually was made head of the university’s Engineering Experiment Station.  It was probably the latter post he was holding when his parents moved to Boulder.

It’s interesting to note that when Dr. Borgmann headed the Engineering Experiment Station, the station performed a study of the use of sunlight and the “greenhouse effect” to heat a home.  Scientist George Lof directed this research, which was sponsored as a war measure by the federal War Production Board’s Office of Production Research and Development.  In 1943, Lof installed a solar heating unit on the roof of his home in Boulder.  It was a box-type structure forty feet long, twelve feet wide, and six inches in depth, covered with three sheets of ordinary window glass.   A fan would draw air into the unit via duct work from the house’s interior.   A portion of the unit’s glass plating had a black coating, and that portion would collect the sun’s short-wave radiation and emit long-wave radiation.  The glass, being opaque to long-wave radiation, prevented its escape.  The trapped heated air would be drawn into the house’s furnace via a sheet-metal pipe, and the furnace fan would blow the heated air through the house’s air vents.   Dr. Lof reported that this installation produced an energy savings of approximately one-third.

In 1947, Carl became Dean of Faculties at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, followed by his appointment in 1952 as President of the University of Vermont in Burlington, a post he held for  six years.  From 1958 until his retirement in 1969 he was Director of Science and Engineering for the Ford Foundation.    Carl would die in Livermore, Colorado in 1998, at the age of 93.  (Livermore is a small foothills town northwest of Fort Collins just below the Colorado-Wyoming border.)

It was in 1946, while Herman and Betsy Borgmann were living in Boulder, that Betsy died at   age 72.   Herman died in 1953 at the age of 83.   Their remains are interred at the Wheat Ridge Cemetery, as are those of their daughter, Frances.    

The timing of the Borgmann’s arrival in Evergreen in about 1919 was propitious, for the town had by that time become a popular travel destination as well as a place to live.  This development had been aided greatly in 1912, when the citizens of Denver voted in a measure creating the Denver Rocky Mountain Parks system.  Evergreen was right in the middle of the resulting thicket of parks created by the measure, including those named Genesee, O’Fallon, Corwina, Bergen and Pence.   

But the bustling presence encountered by the Borgmanns upon their arrival in Evergreen had even older roots in the Colorado Gold Rush of 1859.  These roots were planted when, as a result of the gold rush, toll roads were laid between the lower elevations of Colorado and the gold mining areas.    These roads meant easier access for miners, but also for those interested in seeing what other resources the area had to offer.  In addition to immense timber reserves, seekers found land conducive to the production of high quality hay and root crops and plenty of space for grazing livestock.  In the 1880’s, before Evergreen’s main street became too busy to allow it, it would not have been unusual to see cattle being driven through town on their way to the Morrison rail depot (Morrison sits about 7 miles east of Evergreen) for shipment to the Denver stockyards.  Evidence of Evergreen’s agricultural riches at the time can be found in an article in Denver’s “Queen Bee” newspaper.  Dated January 26, 1887, the article confidently asserts that Evergreen would have a creamery by spring of that year, given that “the product of three to five hundred cows can be had without too much travel.”   

By 1876, enough people had settled in what would become the Evergreen area to induce Dwight Wilmont, a rancher, and his family to apply to the federal government for the establishment of a post office.  When asked for a name to call the settlement, their answer, not surprisingly given their natural surroundings, was “Evergreen.”  Their application was approved and the Evergreen post office was established that year. 

The year 1920 saw the grand opening of the Troutdale in the Pines hotel and resort on Upper Bear Creek near Evergreen.  Owned by Harry Stiles, a wealthy car dealer from Lincoln, Nebraska, along with a group of investors, Troutdale in the Pines was a luxury four-story, 100-room hotel (later expanded to five stories and 300 rooms) of stone and timber. (The stone comprised six thousand wagon loads of rock collected within a five-mile radius of the site.)  It offered its guests a golf course, tennis and riding stables, and its Rainbow Ballroom was a venue for the big dance bands of the era, including those of Tommy Dorsey, Ted Weems, Lawrence Welk and Paul Whiteman.     Troutdale began attracting celebrities seeking out the place as a vacation spot.   Groucho Marx was a frequent visitor, and other celebrities reportedly included Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Jack Benny, Liberace and Ethel Merman.

Following the death of Harry Stiles in 1934, the hotel remained open, but facing significant debts incurred under Stiles’ leadership, hotel management started to hunt for buyers.  Finally, in 1944, a group of Texas businessmen bought the place and two years later sold it to a corporation in Chicago.  In the 1950’s, the resort began losing ground to competitors.  Causes included changing consumer tastes trending more towards families “from Spokane or San Francisco out for a long weekend rather than a family from New York out for a winter or summer.”  Finally, in 1961, the Chicago group closed the place for good. 

Troutdale in the Pines was one of a number of Colorado mountain destination hotels whose establishment was probably helped when the railroads, going as far back as the1880’s, began extending their passenger service beyond Denver and Colorado Springs.  It also helped that railway companies were touting Colorado as a destination, e.g., describing the state as the “Switzerland of America.”   These actions encouraged the building of hotels and resorts in locales such as Georgetown (the Hotel de Paris), Glenwood Springs (the Hotel Colorado), Cripple Creek (the Imperial)  and Estes Park (the Stanley).   

Sometime following the Borgmanns’ departure in 1930, the building housing the Brown Cabin Café became known as the “crafters” building, presumably because it housed a craft business or businesses.  Eventually, it was inhabited by Evergreen Crafters, a family owned and operated company founded in 1948 and still in operation, which sells art, jewelry, souvenirs, and gift and home décor items.  In 2008, however, Evergreen Crafters was forced to move out of the building to another location because of significant damage, including chewed electrical wiring, wreaked beneath its flooring by raccoons.   The building sat empty until 2016, when a remodeling of the place was begun.  Apparently, that effort was abandoned, for, by 2021, the structure had been demolished, with plans to erect a new commercial structure in its place.    

The Brown Cabin Café and Wee Nook sat on what is now the northwest corner of Bear Creek Road (Colorado 74) and Douglas Park Road in Evergreen.  So, if are you’re going north on Bear Creek Road and pass the Little Bear Saloon at 28075 Bear Creek Road on your right,  the very next corner on your right is the former site of the Brown Cabin and Nook.  A Google Maps image from May 2021 shows the site as a vacant lot with three planting beds.

REFERENCES:

  • Distance between Cities,  www.distance-cities.com
  • “Images of American – Evergreen,” by John Steinle, 2017, Arcadia Publishing

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