Papers of Elbert W. DeWalt

Elbert Wilson DeWalt was born in Cameron, Missouri in 1882. A little over a decade later, in 1893, Wilson DeWalt, Elbert’s father, packed him and his younger sister, Anna Jane into a covered wagon bound for Colorado. After first settling east of Boulder, on what is now Baseline Road, the DeWalt family built a small cabin in Boulder Canyon near Glacier Lake. They established a mountain ranch, built a lodging house with stables, and sold provisions to travelers along the nearby Peak-to-Peak Highway, between Nederland and Ward.

When his family moved north to Canada in 1903, Elbert DeWalt married Edith Mary Traverton and purchased a ranch on Washington Avenue, below the original Glacier Lake property. He was employed at the Fisher Ranch during this time, by John Lane, who managed a section of the Boulder County Ranch in addition to the 1300 acres of Fisher holdings in the area.

In 1904, Edith and Elbert DeWalt moved to Altona, a small farming community near Longmont, where Edith would give birth to four daughters: Mary in 1904, Edith in 1906, Eleanor in 1908, and Velma in 1913. They joined the Boulder County Pomona Grange, located in Altona, in 1906, and took the seventh degree of the Grange order in Kansas City in 1945.

In the forty years between 1906 and 1945, Elbert DeWalt served as Master of Boulder, Larimer, Park, and Weld County jurisdictions, and as Deputy of the Colorado State Grange organization. He organized six granges in Boulder and Larimer counties during that time, and helped to establish others in Baca, Chaffee, and Douglas counties. After retiring from his official Colorado State Grange appointments, Elbert DeWalt continued to be regarded as a leader in agricultural communities throughout the state.

Edith and Elbert DeWalt lived on their Altona farm for sixty-seven years, raising Guernsey dairy cows and cultivating their eighty acres until Elbert’s death in 1971.