Historic Places of Livermore, Colorado

...a small place bought in 1917 from the wife of the man who had homesteaded it. The man was John Pearce, an educated architect, who filed on 160 acres on Elkhorn Creek in 1884. Mr Pearce had been educated in England and came to America with is wife, Mary Emily, lovingly called Polly, by all her friends. He was the designer of the First Episcopal Cathedral in Denver, so the story goes. He retired to his ranch or homestead, which he named Coral Rock Ranch, from the large pointed hill in front of the home which he believed resembled a piece of coral. He developed and mapped out and filed on ditches to irrigate the small meadows which followed the course of the Elkhorn Creek. John Pearce had been brought up with the ideas of being a gentleman farmer and that he tried to be. Boys in the neighborhood came to milk his cow, cut wood for the two fireplaces that heated the house, cut and put his hay into his barn, and took it out and fed it. He had checks which arrived periodically from England

June 24, 1888 Final proof in support of claim.  SE 1/4 of SE 1/4 and W 1/2 SE 1/4 and SE 1/4 of SW 1/4 of section 13, township 9 north of R 73 west. Witnesses John Hemingway Frank Ayers Fred Smith Thomas Holliday

 The way the story is told in local histories, in about 1880 a Mr Adams, first name unknown, stopped along the wagon trail at a water spring, set up residence, and filed for a homestead. It's reported that he built a hotel and ran a dairy. With developing technology, it's now possible for us to view a copy of Mr Adams filing, from the Bureau of Land Management. Mr Joseph D Adams filed this document on June 1, 1882, for 40 acres within Section 16 of Township 9 North, Range 71 West, in Larimer County, Colorado. The signature of Chester A. Arthur, the President of the United States, was attached and attested by S.W. Clark, Recorder of the General Land Office. No mention is made of Section 16 as a school section , as required by the Act of May 20, 1785, the Western Land Ordinance, as passed by the United States Congress. Technically, this filing was not done as a Cash Entry, rather than under the conditions of the Homestead Act of 1862. According to the text here, the registration

In the early days, the road between the Forks and Log Cabin went south around McNey Hill, not over the top as we drive today. Thousands of travelers passed along this route in the 1880s, back and forth to the gold discoveries and growing towns at Manhattan , Lulu City , and Teller City . As the only road between the supply town of Fort Collins and North Park, on the far side of Cameron Pass, all freight, supplies, equipment, building materials passed over it. The tracks of the 125-year-old alignment are still visible. The grasses are yet to grow back, and the roadway can be seen rising across the crest of the hillside. Today's alignment of Red Feather Lakes Road, over the top of the hill, was engineered in 1896. Prior to that, the wagon road turned south just as the road emerges at the top of today's S-curve, on the west, at about mile marker 8. The wagon road can be seen from that vantage point, about a quarter mile downhill from the parking area of the Cherokee Park State Wil