Evergreen history: a ranch valley on Bear Creek, a summer colony, Denver's lake and a commuter town

Evergreen has never been a town in the legal sense. It is an unincorporated community governed by Jefferson County, in the foothills about 19 miles west of Denver, and its story is less about a town hall than about the people who came up the hill: ranchers and loggers first, then Denver families with summer cabins, then an Episcopal music colony, then the City of Denver, which built the lake, and finally commuters. This is the short version, from the sources listed at the foot; where they disagree, both are given.

Before Evergreen

The land along Bear Creek had been Ute, Arapaho and Cheyenne hunting ground, Wikipedia’s account of the Evergreen Conference District says, before fur traders and trappers passed through by 1821 and prospectors came with the gold rush that began in 1858. The first settlement was north of today’s downtown. In 1859 Thomas Cunningham Bergen built a log cabin on his land and gave it his name, Bergen Park, and that year is the one Wikipedia gives for the first settlement of the Evergreen area, then part of Kansas Territory. The Evergreen Area Chamber of Commerce describes the beginning as a close-knit group of families who settled in 1859 and formed a ranching community.

A name and a post office

The name came from the trees. Wikipedia’s Conference District article says the area was first called Evergreen when D.P. Wilmot admired the firs, spruce and pines on land he acquired in Buffalo Park around 1875, and that Evergreen became a place of its own, apart from Bergen Park, in 1877, when Amos Post, who married Thomas Bergen’s daughter, opened a trading post and then a general store on what is now Main Street. The post office is dated two ways. The chamber says Evergreen’s first post office was established in 1875, which made 2025 the community’s 150th anniversary; Wikipedia says the Evergreen, Colorado Territory, post office opened on 17 July 1876.

Ranchers, loggers and farmers settled along Bear Creek. The chamber’s history traces one ranch from John J. Clarke, who homesteaded 350 acres in 1878; his small cabin is still the oldest part of the house that became the Humphrey family’s Kinnikinnick Ranch, and like most Evergreen residents, the chamber says, he logged the land to meet Denver’s demand for lumber. The Evergreen Mountain Area Historical Society still holds classes in a one-room schoolhouse of the period, Medlen School on South Turkey Creek Road, built in 1886 and restored where it stands.

The summer colony

By the late nineteenth century Denver families were coming up the hill to build summer homes and hunting cabins, and the family that shaped the place most arrived then. The county’s history of Hiwan Heritage Park begins in 1893, when Dr. Mary Josepha “Jo” Williams and her mother, Mary Neosho Bailey Williams, a Civil War general’s widow, bought land for a summer retreat they called Camp Neosho, and hired the carpenter John “Jock” Spence, who turned a simple barn into a log cabin. Wikipedia’s article on the museum puts the purchase in the late 1880s and the three-room cabin’s completion in 1893. Dr. Jo had graduated from Gross Medical College in Denver in 1889, one of the first women in Colorado to earn a medical degree, and ran a tuberculosis sanitarium in Denver with Dr. Madeleine Marquette. She married the Episcopal priest and composer Charles Winfred Douglas in 1896, closed the sanitarium under the social pressure of the day, and moved to Camp Neosho full time; their son Eric, born there in 1897, became a curator of Indigenous art at the Denver Art Museum.

Canon Douglas made Evergreen a music town. Mary Neosho Williams had begun holding Episcopal services in tents, and the family gave land and buildings for what became the Evergreen Conference, which Wikipedia calls the oldest continuing music center in the United States, in operation since 1907. Its Meeting House, built by the Episcopal Church in 1924 and listed by Wikipedia among Jock Spence’s work, housed Douglas’s summer music camps and a six-week school of liturgical music for more than 50 years. The conference grounds, 23 buildings along Bear Creek, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Evergreen Conference District in 1979.

At Camp Neosho, Spence kept adding rooms and towers. A chapel on the second floor was finished in 1918, the historical society says; Wikipedia says that expansion brought the house to seventeen rooms, and the society now describes it as a 25-room log lodge grown from a one-room cabin of 1893.

Denver’s parks and the lake

In 1912 Denver began buying land in the foothills for its mountain parks, starting with Genesee Park. Several are around Evergreen. Fillius Park, bought in 1914, was an early resting spot on the scenic drive along what is now Highway 74; Bergen Park has been a picnic ground since its stone shelter was built in 1917; and in 1919 the City acquired the Dedisse Ranch, by which time, in Denver’s words, Evergreen was “already established as a popular summer retreat.” Wikipedia says the 420 acres had been the ranch of the 1860s pioneer Julius C. Dedisse and were taken by condemnation, with $25,000 paid to the family.

The Evergreen Golf Course was built on the land in 1925, Colorado’s first mountain golf course by Wikipedia’s account, and then Denver dammed Bear Creek. Wikipedia’s Dedisse article says the 35-foot dam was built in 1927–28 as flood control on a creek with a long record of floods, its Evergreen article gives the year as 1927, and the chamber says the reservoir filled in 1928, after which the area grew more popular still. Evergreen Lake is still part of Denver’s Dedisse Park and is managed by the Evergreen Park & Recreation District, and the district notes that it is also the main water supply for the area.

Hiwan Ranch and the year-round town

Dr. Jo died in 1938, and the county’s history records that Camp Neosho was sold to the Oklahoma oilman and rancher Darst Buchanan. He and his wife Ruth renamed it Hiwan Ranch in 1939 and built it into more than 15,000 acres and one of the leading Hereford herds in the country, helped by a record $61,000 bull. In the 1950s Buchanan and his son-in-law John Casey founded the Hiwan Development Company, which built Evergreen’s first large subdivisions, the Hiwan Hills neighborhood and Hiwan Golf Club, and brought water and sewer service to what had been mostly a summer town.

That is when Evergreen became a commuter community, the chamber says, though it credits one man with starting early: Lee Humphrey, who bought the Clarke ranch in 1920 and drove his Model T, Mary Ann, two and a half hours a day to a newspaper copy desk in Denver, the mountain area’s first year-round Denver commuter by the chamber’s account. The services followed the houses. Evergreen’s volunteer fire department was founded in 1948, and the Evergreen Recreation Association in 1956; in January 1969 residents voted to create a recreation district to build a community center with a swimming pool, the body renamed the Evergreen Park & Recreation District in 1991.

Saving the old buildings

The Buchanan family’s descendants lived at Hiwan until 1973. When the buildings faced redevelopment, residents and the Jefferson County Historical Society pressed the county to buy them, and the society, founded in 1973 and now the Evergreen Mountain Area Historical Society, counts that as its first success. Jefferson County Parks & Open Space bought the property in 1974, the lodge went on the National Register the same year, and the museum opened in 1975; Wikipedia dates the opening to 3 August 1975 and calls the purchase the first use of county Open Space money in the area. It is now Hiwan Heritage Park & Museum.

Other land followed. The chamber says the Alderfer family’s ranch, a Hester homestead where the Alderfers raised silver foxes and then Angus cattle and ran a sawmill, was acquired by Jefferson County Open Space in 1977 at Hank Alderfer’s suggestion, with neighboring land added as late as 2002; it is Alderfer/Three Sisters Park, with what the county calls the most trails per acre of any foothills park. In 1993 a Mountain Area Land Trust campaign saved the 408-acre Noble Meadow, an elk grazing and calving ground, in a cooperative project with the landowner, the recreation district and Jeffco Open Space. The Evergreen Chorale, which had rented the old Meeting House since the 1970s, bought it in 1989 and renamed it Center Stage; Ovation West says it was recognized as a Jefferson County Historic Landmark in 2021. Hazel Lou Humphrey left her family’s ranch to a museum, and the chamber says the Little Bear Saloon on Main Street began as St. Mark’s in the Wilderness Episcopal Church, built in 1875 and moved to Main Street in the 1890s; Wikipedia’s Conference District article gives that church name instead to the old Stewart Hotel the Williams family bought.

Evergreen now

The census first drew an Evergreen census-designated place for 1970, when it counted 2,321 people; it counted 9,307 in 2020, Wikipedia’s table shows. The districts that serve the wider area count more: about 23,000 inside the recreation district and nearly 26,000 across the fire district’s more than 120 square miles. The Evergreen Library, built in 1989, was renovated and reopened in 2024. There is still no town government; how the county and the districts divide the work is set out in Moving to Evergreen.