$275,000
Own your own piece of history! We have 9.79 acres of pristine land located at 1150 S. Russellville Road! With multiple building sites, this parcel offers serene views, meadows for your horses, natural year-round stream, adjacent hiking trail, mature trees, wildlife, easy access and well. This rare parcel of land comes complete with its own history.
Russellville Ranch, a 33-acre private ranch just southeast of Franktown, is the earliest settlement in Douglas County. It has several ties to Confederate history as well as “Pike’s Peak or Bust” gold rush tales. From the first gold discovery by Russell Green in 1857, the first sawmill, the first cabin and the first Settlers Town before Denver! Also including the first discovery of gold on Cherry Creek!
After the War Russellville became a lumber supplier with as many as 6 mills operating in the 1880’s. It’s location within the Black Forest provided plenty of Ponderosa Pine lumber for the booming Colorado economy. The town eventually faded into history and became part of a private ranch. In 2004 Douglas County designated the ranch a historic landmark.
Franktown takes its name from James Frank Gardner, a would-be gold miner who built a squatter's cabin four miles north of here in 1859. A popular rest stop on the busy Jimmy Camp Trail (which followed Cherry Creek into Denver), "Frank's Town" was designated the seat of Douglas County in 1861; the settlement moved to its current location two years later. Though railroads made the trail obsolete after 1870, and the county offices moved to Castle Rock in 1874, Franktown remained a ranching and farming hub, held together by its church, school, grange, and handful of businesses. It never incorporated, and during the twentieth century no more than a hundred people called it home, but that's how the locals liked it. Even as suburban sprawl surrounded it in the 1990s, Franktown resisted efforts to develop, maintaining a distinctly rural identity.
Franktown's strong agricultural roots made it a natural fit for the grange, a cooperative farmers' movement that swept rural America in the mid-1870s. Several dozen chapters formed in Colorado, including the Fonder Grange (founded near here in 1875) and its successor, Pikes Peak Grange No. 163 (established in Franktown in 1908). Both belonged to the statewide grange organization, which set up credit unions, insurance programs, and other services, and to the national grange association, which pursued long-range political goals. But it was the local chapters that really affected farmers' lives. The dances, holiday picnics, and town meetings they sponsored helped sparsely populated communities forge a sense of identity. Still active today, Pikes Peak Grange No. 163 occupies its original hall, which stands just north of here and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Also visible are some original wagon ruts where wagons, miners and stagecoach crossed the creek in this location!
Copyright © 2012 MakeMyHouseFamous.com. All rights reserved.
