Sun Hills Association

Sun Hills Estates History

Sep 22, 2000

The Land. Seventy million years ago Sun Hills was a sandy bottom beneath the sea. After volcanic pressure then pushed up deep layers of rock to form the young Rocky Mountains, and then the entire center of the United States rose to drain the sea down to what is now the Gulf of Mexico, Colorado was left with a paradoxical mix of huge mountains and seabed fossils, and Sun Hills was left with soil so sandy that your house's foundation can slip if you water too much on the uphill side.
This sandy soil will grow almost anything if it gets enough water, but Mother Nature doesn't provide enough water to support more than conifer trees, scrub oak, tough grasses and some great wildflowers. Yucca, small cactus and other desert plants are happy here.
The Dawson and lower Denver aquifers are below us, and as long as they last we won't have to ask Colorado Springs to annex us so we might use the water it must pipe in literally through the mountains from as far away as Breckenridge. Water is the major long-term ecological concern of Colorado, of Colorado Springs, and of Sun Hills.

Pioneers Before Us. In 1833 the first settlement in El Paso County--one of the original seventeen counties in the Colorado Territory--was established at Jimmy's Camp on the southern edge of the Black Forest, a few miles SE of Sun Hills . A trading post offering trinkets, metal tools, rifles and liquor to local Indians for valuable furs and buffalo skins, Jimmy's Camp was a key stop on the Cherokee Trail, which went from Bent's Fork on the Arkansas River up to Fort Laramie, where it joined the Oregon Trail.
The 1859 Colorado Gold Rush ("Pike's Peak or Bust") initiated the flow of frustrated gold miners and covered-wagon pioneers who settled along Monument Creek, which parallels I-25 just to the west on Air Force Academy property. By the time of the Civil War, small ranches were scattered around northern El Paso County, raising livestock and logging in the Black Forest. The two-day Colorado City-Denver stagecoach route passed nearby along Monument Creek.
Having been offered the whole of Colorado by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie--which the U.S. Senate never ratified but which to them was a fine point--by 1863 local Indians lost their sense of humor over the Gold Rush-inspired settlers ("the only good Indian is a dead Indian") and began attacking them. The following year Governor John Evans issued a proclamation ordering Indians to assemble at four locations near Army forts. After hundreds had done exactly as ordered, gathering at Sand Creek forty miles northwest of Fort Lyon, on November 29, 1864 the Colorado Militia under Colonel John M. Chivington, including volunteers from El Paso County, surprised the Sand Creek Indian camp and killed almost 500 Indians, including women and children. Indian attacks continued for years, and on September 1, 1868, Cheyenne and Arapaho war parties killed several men around the tiny town of Husted, established by sawmill operator Calvin R. Husted, located where the I-25 interchange with North Gate Road stands today.
In October 1971, General Palmer's Denver & Rio Grand Railroad ran its first train along the Monument Creek route used by the stagecoaches. That same year Palmer established the civilized town of Colorado Springs downhill from the more raucous mining-camp support town of Colorado City. The town of Husted grew on railroad business, supplying railroad ties and other lumber cut from Black Forest trees. By the 1890s, Husted had a population of 75, taking advantage of the railroad to ship out lumber, meat and dairy products from local ranches, and potatos that grow well in our sandy soil, with a bit of irrigation. During this decade our region became one of the nation's major potato-growing areas, with some 20,000 acres producing about 2,000 railcars of potatos per year. You might want to give them a try in your garden.
Interestingly, as Colorado Springs grew with the automobile, Husted shrank with the railroad. By 1920 the Colorado Springs post office took over the work of the Husted post office. By 1941, Husted had only 6 residents. And in 1956, the U.S. Government bought the ghost town of Husted for $551.25 and plowed it under for the highway exit into the Air Force Academy's North Gate. The Mining Museum curator's farmhouse, which you see when you drive by (the beautiful main museum building is farther back on the 27-acre site, behind the trees), was built in 1894 by Joseph and Sarah Reynolds from Pennsylvania, who would have known their Husted neighbors well, as they bought the land in 1889 and he was elected to the Colorado House of Representatives in 1891. So we have this one tangible tie to pioneers who lived in our immediate area.

Home of the U.S. Air Force Academy. In 1950, when the Service Academy Board recommended that an Air Force Academy be built (and 580 sites were proposed in 45 states), our neighborhood consisted essentially of cattle ranches raising mostly Herefords & Angus. Big Midwest corn farmers liked to stay at the Broadmoor, in the still-small town of Colorado Springs, while buying calves to ship home for fattening and later sale to Chicago packing houses. Most local ranches were small--the Academy's present 18,500 acres were pulled together by a State of Colorado Acquisition Commission from 135 separately-owned properties. The June 24, 1954 front page of the Colorado Springs Free Press splashed the news of Colorado Springs' selection to host the new Academy. At Lowry AFB on July 11, 1955, the Class of 1959 was assembled as 306 young men were sworn in to be the first cadets. In August 1958, the Cadet Wing moved into the Rampart Range campus.

Sun Hills. But just before the cadets came here, on April 9, 1958, one George E. Hardesty, owner of land to be called Sun Hills Subdivision No. 1, filed his subdivision plat with the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder, paying a fee of $8.50. Sun Hills was born, and would grow quickly to 147 lots of 5 acres each, particularly as Air Force buddies associated with the new Academy and the North American Air Defense Command down in Colorado Springs called each other to share the good news of 5 acres of Colorado, minutes from the new campus, available for $3,000 or less. The majority of buyers were Air Force officers, including General Earle Partridge, the first CINCNORAD ('57-'59), who bought Lot 3 between Sun Hills Drive and Rangely.
That same year, 1958, our neighbor and early Sun Hills Architectural Control Committee Chairman Joe Greco bought the lot on Silverton Road where he now lives.