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

Fae Oram grew up in the “sunshine corner house” with a green roof. The yellow house was brought to Keota by the railroad. From 1908 to about 1940, Sears sold houses by catalog, shipping most of the materials to build it on the railroad. Once the kit arrived, the new homeowner raised the house with the help of family, friends, and neighbors.  


Yellow house with green roof in Keota, Colorado.

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Photo of the House on Sunshine Corner, Keota, Sept. 1973

A woman’s workday is like the Eastern Colorado sky--there’s no end to it. You cook from scratch; make, alter, mend, wash and iron everyone’s clothes; cook, clean up, and cook again. You gather eggs, milk the cow, and tend the garden. If anyone in your family gets injured or sick, you’re the doctor and the nurse. And when a neighbor drops by for some coffee and small talk, she brings her mending, you get out your sewing kit, and you both keep working. 

Image: Reenactor portraying Elizabeth Rohn

Radio stations broadcast the news, sports, serialized stories, important speeches, and more, providing an important connection to the rest of the world. Before the radio, farmers relied on newspapers to predict the weather, which could be too slow. Farmers also used the radio for market prices for their goods, placed ads for their services, and wrote in to radio shows for advice. People were also introduced to popular music through radio, as well as classical music and jazz. 

The history of the radio dates back to at least 1894, when Gugliemo Marconi began experimenting with transmitting using radio waves in Italy. By 1910, the Census Bureau recorded whether households in Keota had radios, indicating that the technology was spreading through rural areas of the country. 

The earliest Peerless Radios came on the market in the mid 1920s and were battery operated. Generally speaking, the earlier the radio, the fewer number of tubes it had. A 1924 Peerless Radio found on line has only one tube. Late 1920s and early 1930s models had three tubes.

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Peerless radio speaker

Cast iron stoves were heated by burning coal, which left ashes that had to be cleaned out on a regular basis, hopefully not while a person was still cooking! 

Henry Ford’s Model T is the American Dream on four wheels. It will take you much farther than a horse-drawn buggy, and in much less time. And you can harness the Model T’s versatile engine to power all kinds of farm machinery. Folks have adapted it for threshing, harrowing, sawing logs, and grinding grain. You might even see one pulling a plow. The Model T means less work, lower costs, bigger harvests, and a better, easier life. 


The Model T was produced from 1908 to 1927. A more affordable model than previous Ford cars, the Model T was popular with rural communities like Keota and was sold in major cities across the country. 

Pumping water was an important daily chore on the homestead. Very few farming families had indoor plumbing in the 1920s, so they pumped water outside and brought it into the house in buckets for all their daily tasks, including cooking, washing clothes, and bathing. 

Since its creation centuries ago, ice cream has always been a popular treat. Children and adults went right to work churning the mixture of cream and sugar--or a powdered version with milk--and up to an hour later, it was ready! The first hand churns were invented in the 1840s, and are still around today. 

Resource Kits

Object Library

Museums

Little Town on the Plains: Keota, Colorado

Around the Homestead: The Yellow House

The Yellow House