History Colorado

Learn more about the people of Keota throughout the rest of their lives. 

More About the People of Keota

Water tower in Keota. Photo taken November 8, 2010 by History Colorado staff. 

Ghost Town

Explore key local, national, and global events that impacted the town of Keota.  

Timeline

Around the Homestead: The Barn

No one in Keota had indoor plumbing. Outhouses (also known as privies) were a fact of life for homesteaders--even town folk. Enjoy these pictures of historic outhouses and appreciate how fortunate most of us are to have modern plumbing!

Around the Homestead: The Outhouse

At Keota's peak in the 1910s and 1920s, enough people lived in the town that the elementary school and high school were separate buildings. As families moved away during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the schools were once again combined in the same building. 

Keota School

Although Keota was always a small town, by 1920 it had grown enough to be counted on the national census, with 129 people living in the town itself. In this activity, meet six of Keota’s residents and learn about what they do everyday.


Meet the People of Keota

Keota was a dryland farming community on the Eastern Plains of Colorado that began in the 1860s after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act granted Americans 160-acre plots of public land provided they lived on it, improved it, and paid a small registration fee. Explore the map of Colorado to learn more about the land around Keota. 

Little Town on the Plains

Detail of map showing the stops on the Burlington Railroad line in Colorado. 

The CB&Q Railroad and the Telegraph

Some women embraced homesteading as a symbol of independence, and most female homesteaders in the Keota area proved up their claims alone. A minority shared claims with male relatives or husbands. Mary Beardsley proved up her claim on what is now Keota in 1889. In this activity, explore objects around one house in Keota -- that still stands today -- and the importance of women's work on the homestead. 

Around the Homestead: The Yellow House

There’s always something going on at Clyde Stanley’s store. He sells groceries and hardware, publishes the newspaper, files homestead claims and takes catalog orders, brings the mail in and sends it out. Short on cash? Not to worry; you can pay your bill with spare eggs or cream from your farm. If you want to do business, swap gossip or just see a friendly face, Stanley’s is the place.  Check out the goods Clyde Stanley sold at the general store and learn about the long history of brands we still see on shelves today!

General Store

Anything you might have needed--and many things you probably didn't--could be ordered from one of Chicago's huge mail-order companies. Both Montgomery Ward (1872) and Sears (1888) catered especially to rural families. When Rural Free Delivery began in 1896, people living in towns like Keota had access to everything in the catalogs. But they didn't always have the money needed to make purchases. Farmers traded goods and services more often than they used cash. The average family in Keota made three catalog orders a year, spending about $5 an order.

Look through a selection of items from the Montgomery Ward catalog and discover how much they cost in the 1920s!

Montgomery Ward Catalog

It’s flat, windy, and dry--the middle of nowhere. The Eastern Colorado prairies look pretty bleak to most people. But to new homesteaders, they look like heaven. 

A family can prosper here and build for the future. There’s plenty of land (it’s free--just stake a claim), a railroad, a good school, and a strong community. Folks can support themselves, build some savings, maybe leave something behind for the next generation.

Keota doesn’t have everything, but it has all the things that matter. Freedom. Independence. Opportunity. Community. Those are the blessings that fill these empty prairies. 


This resource kit addresses the essential question 

How was life in Keota different from life today? How is it similar? 

Supporting questions addressed by specific activities include:

What was daily life like in Keota 100 years ago?

How did technology differ from what we use today? 

What national and global events shaped Keota’s history? 

For more, visit History Colorado's Primary Source Set: 

https://www.historycolorado.org/sites/default/files/media/document/2018/keota_primary_resource_set.pdf

Little Town on the Plains: Keota, Colorado

U.S. History

Social Studies

Eleanor Rose Vawter Ball was born in 1925 near Keota. Both of her grandparents homesteaded nearby. Ball’s father was an auto mechanic at the Eagle Garage on Keota’s main street. The family lived across the street from Clyde Stanley’s general store. Ball remained in Weld County, became a great-grandmother, and eventually wrote a book, The First Rose of Summer, documenting her life in northeastern Colorado. 

Clyde Stanley’s family homesteaded near Keota. In 1911, when he was just 24, Stanley took up a neighboring homestead. He began publishing The Keota News a short time later, and in 1923 he took over the general store, which was also the post office, land office, and lending library--the center of town. Clyde Stanley lived in Keota for 64 years, watching the population dwindle to 5. 

Image: Reenactor portraying Clyde Stanley.

Like her brother Clyde Stanley, E. Fae Stanley Oram took up an adjoining homestead when her family moved to Keota in 1911. Unlike many women of her time, Oram pursued a college degree. While most of her University of Colorado classmates took jobs in cities, Oram returned to the prairie to teach, believing that rural students deserved the same education as city kids. A beloved teacher to hundreds of students, Oram taught for 50 years throughout eastern Colorado. She lived in Keota for 64 years. 

Estell (Ole) Olsen, the youngest of seven children, was born in Silver Creek, Nebraska, in 1908, to Norwegian parents. The family moved to Keota to homestead in 1910, arriving by train with all their possessions. Though he lived near Keota, Olsen took a variety of jobs around Colorado to make a living, including running a Conoco station in Gearheart and working at a mine in Breckenridge. 

Like many Colorado homesteaders, Elizabeth Dorn Rohn was born in Russia but was of German descent. Many Germans had migrated to Russia in search of opportunity in the nineteenth century, and when they didn’t find it there, they came to America in the early 1900s. Rohn met her husband, who was also Russian German, in Loveland, Colorado. Like other rural women of her time, Rohn worked hard to build a life for her family. Her grandson Bob still lives and raises cattle on land homesteaded by their family in the 1910s. 

Image: Reenactor portraying Elizabeth Rohn.


Henry P. Hart’s parents were German by birth, migrating to Colorado from Russia. They homesteaded 640 acres near Keota when he was 17. Wounded in France during World War I, Hart returned to the United States and studied animal husbandry in Fort Collins. He married Ferol Jones in 1921, and the couple homesteaded 320 acres near Keota. Hart constructed all the ranch buildings by hand. Two of the Hart’s three children, Alice and Winona, were instrumental in starting the annual Keota School and Friends reunion, which still takes place every August. 


Resource Kits

Object Library

Museums

Little Town on the Plains: Keota, Colorado

More About the People of Keota

Rose Ball