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Photo postcard of proprietor George Noll in front of his store at 25th & Sheridan, Edgewater, CO, ca. 1903 – 1920’s.

Writing on the back of this postcard identifies the man standing on the left as “Grandpa Noll” (and allots a question mark to the fellow on the right). Born in Germany in 1858, George Anton Noll emigrated to the United States in 1883. By 1889 he had come to the Denver area, for that is where he married Coloradan Lena Adeline Wortmann, daughter of Denver baker Engelbert Wortmann and his wife, Carrie, both of whom had immigrated from Prussia. George and Lena went on to have six children, three boys and three girls.

In 1890, George and Lena moved to the emerging town of Edgewater, located a few miles west of Denver. (Present-day Edgewater is surrounded by Denver to the east, Lakewood to the south and west and Wheat Ridge to the north.)   It is there that George opened the Grocery and Meat Market pictured in the photo and built the first home within Edgewater’s original boundaries. (A look at the intersection of 25th and Sheridan on Google Maps shows that nothing remains of the Noll store.)

The Nolls’ home was located at 2461 Ames Street. Here’s a link to a 1962 Denver Post photo (now owned by Getty) showing George and Lena’s son Anton standing in the front of the place:  https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/anton-noll-a-son-of-first-edgewater-resident-george-noll-news-photo/837946620 .   There’s also a 2019 Google Maps photo which I believe shows the place, but with some modifications. To view it, go to https://www.google.com/maps  and enter “2461 Ames Street, Edgewater, CO” in the search box. The Noll home is now part of a larger structure and is to the right of the driveway, hiding behind a couple of trees. If you go up Ames Street to the right just a wee tad and look to the left, you can get a better view.

In 1861, twenty-nine years before the Nolls’ arrival, there was no Edgewater, but, rather, the farm of Thomas Sloan. One day Sloan set about digging a well for his place and in doing so encountered and unleashed an underground spring. It proceeded to fill his well and went on to cover nearly 200 acres of his land, thereby giving birth to Sloan’s Lake.  Sloan made the best of the situation by cutting lake ice in the winter, packing the cut blocks in sawdust inside storage sheds, and selling the ice to commercial establishments.

It was on the west side of Sloan’s Lake that Edgewater grew. But it didn’t grow quickly. In the early 1880’s, it was just a handful of fishing shacks, reportedly a few log-built roadhouses and maybe even a gambling house. It was not until the early 1890’s that more people began moving to Edgewater, some motivated perhaps by the desire to escape the crowded and highly-taxed environs of Denver. The Edgewater post office was established in March of 1892, and the town continued to grow, becoming incorporated in August of 1901. The town’s first post office was in the Widow Humphrey’s home on Sheridan Boulevard. Her successor, Frank Miller, who became postmaster in 1894, used a corner of his grocery store, also on Sheridan, for postal matters.   When Denver trolley service was expanded out to Sheridan Boulevard, Miller would meet the trolley with his wheelbarrow, pick up the mail brought by the trolley and transport it back to his store in his wheelbarrow. A new post office was built in 1914 at 25th and Ames.

[An interesting story in the March 19,  1910 , Aspen Democrat-Times newspaper alleged that postmaster Miller’s wife, who was unnamed in the article, assaulted George and Lena’s daughter, Mary, who would have been 19 at the time. The article reported that Mary was in serious condition “from a blow over the heart inflicted by Mrs. Miller with her fist.”  I could find no follow-up story, but the fact that Mary lived to be 65 years old tells me the assault had  no fatal consequences for her.]

I’m sure George’s store had regular customers, but two were known to have never paid for anything. Those would be the St. Bernard dog and the sheep who hung out together on the sidewalks in front of the store. To see a picture of them, as well as a photo of the store in its very early days, visit the Edgewater Elementary School website at https://edgewater.jeffcopublicschools.org/our_school/our_history.   Their website contains additional information on the history of Edgewater, including that of its schools.

On June 27, 1891, Edgewater witnessed the arrival of a high-profile neighbor on the northeast side of the lake. For that was the opening day of the Manhattan Beach amusement park. (Elitch’s Zoological Gardens, which would later feature classic amusement park activities, had opened in May of the previous year. It was located a couple of miles northeast of Manhattan Beach, at 38th and Tennyson. Elitch’s main amusement park competitor, White City, named for its sparkling display of over 100,000 lights and later to be named Lakeside, opened in 1908 at 46th and Sheridan, about 7 miles east of the original Elitch’s location.)

Manhattan Beach’s attractions included a theater for vaudeville and light opera, a roller coaster, hot air balloon rides, and more than 40 species of animals. The hands-down most popular animal was Roger the Elephant.

A tragic event involving Roger and five-year-old George Eaton played out at about 4:20 p.m. on July 5, 1891. Roger, known for his gentleness, was providing rides to children in a basket strapped to his back. George Eaton was a passenger in the basket with five other children when a hot-air balloon began ascending. It is not known whether Roger was spooked by the balloon or by the crowd of people who moved in his direction to watch the balloon rise, but his swerving to return to the corral threw George out of the basket and onto the ground, where, in his frantic state, Roger trampled the boy, who was killed instantly. It was an awful sight, witnessed by many, including George’s parents, Pressley and Harriet Eaton. Roger’s trainer, Fred Knight, in his efforts to re-gain control of the animal, was struck in the face by Roger’s trunk and suffered a broken nose and cut forehead.

George Eaton’s headstone at Denver’s Riverside Cemetery reads, “Son of P & H Eaton, Killed at Manhattan Beach, July 5, 1891, Aged 5 Yrs. 11 Ms. 16Ds.”  Here’s a link to it:  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/32002457/george-eaton . 

(Following the loss of their son, the Eaton family moved out of Colorado and settled on Mica Bay in Idaho, where Pressley farmed. Pressley was killed in March of 1904 while hauling wood on a bluff in a horse-drawn sled. Conditions were icy, and traveling downhill, Eaton tried to turn the accelerating sled but struck a tree and was thrown off the bluff to his death. He left behind his wife Harriet and five children.)

An urban legend grew out of George Eaton’s death at Manhattan Beach, namely, that very soon after George’s death trainer Fred Knight took Roger to swampland near Edgewater, where he shot and buried him. One account says Roger was buried at what is now the northeast corner of 20th and Depew. This legend is seriously weakened by two subsequent news items.

The first involves a report in September of 1891, two months after Eaton’s death, of financial difficulties already plaguing the new amusement park. Creditors had taken temporary legal ownership of Manhattan Beach and its animals, and the owners of Elitch Garden’s owners had  bought the park’s  chattel debt, for which Manhattan Beach’s animals were the collateral. Control of the animals, though, was still retained by Manhattan Beach. There were tensions between the two parks, and Elitch’s management exacerbated those tensions by publicly charging that Manhattan Beach was mistreating its animals.

Things came to a head in the pre-dawn hours of September 11th. A group of thirty-five private detectives with the Keith Detective Agency, led by its head, O.E. Keith,  and with animal wagons in tow, set out from Elitch Gardens for Manhattan Beach to “liberate” the Manhattan Beach animals and take them to Elitch’s. Word must have leaked out about this, for, back at Manhattan Beach, a Mr. C. O. Hatch had formed a group of twelve men to block the gate to the Manhattan Beach animal house. They also attached fire hoses to the park’s water hydrants. When the Elitch contingent got within range, Hatch yelled “Fire!” the Manhattan Beach crew opened up on them with the fire hoses, “…and men bathed in water who had never had a bath before.”  The Elitch invasion was vanquished.

The next day a Denver judge refused to consider charges that the animals at Manhattan Beach were being mistreated and ruled that the animals should remain where they were. One of those animals was Roger the elephant, still alive and well.

The second piece of evidence pointing away from Roger’s burial in the swamp was an ad posted by Manhattan Beach in the Rocky Mountain News in 1892 announcing Roger’s annual bath. Ironically, it was posted exactly one day short of the first anniversary of young Eaton’s demise.

Manhattan Beach would stay in operation until 1908, when a fire forced it to close. It was rebuilt and replaced later that year by Luna Park, which operated until 1914.

It appears that, by 1930, George had given up the proprietorship of his store and retired, and, as of 1932, he and Lena were still residing at 2461 Ames Street. George died in November of 1939 at age 81, and Lena died one month later at age 67. Their remains are interred at Crown Hill Cemetery in Wheatridge.

REFERENCES:

  • “Colorado Post Offices 1859 – 1989” by Bauer, Ozment and Willard, 1990, published by the Colorado Railroad Museum
  • “DENVER AREA POST-WORLD WAR II SUBURBS ,” by Bunyak Research Associates & Front Range Research Associates, Inc. (pages 17 and 18), April 2011, for the COLORADO DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION APPLIED RESEARCH AND INNOVATION BRANCH (see pages 17 and 18).   [Note:  the above-cited document is on-line as a PDF document, and I’m unable to provide a link to it. But to the see document, do a Google search on “DENVER AREA POST-WORLD WAR II SUBURBS – Colorado.”]

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/32002457/george-eaton

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/74057389/pressley-eaton

https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/verify/verify-is-an-elephant-buried-under-a- colorado-supermarket/73-548063816

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