Paonia

On the North Fork

Paonia stands in the North Fork of the Gunnison River Valley, in Delta County on the Western Slope of Colorado.^1,2 A roadside byway marker says cattle ranching, mining, fruit growing, wine making, and area artisans contribute to the economy of the Hotchkiss/Paonia area, also known as the North Fork Valley.³

Samuel Wade’s Peonies

A marker in town records that ten men led by Father Francisco Domínguez, with Father Silvestre Escalante keeping the diary, left Santa Fe on July 29, 1776, seeking a route to Monterey, California, and arrived near the spot with Indian guides on August 31.⁴ The valley remained Ute territory, though ranchers grazed large cattle herds on it illicitly in the 1870s, until the 1880 treaty opened this part of the state to American settlement.⁵ About the middle of August, 1881, Enos T. Hotchkiss returned to the area with a party that included Samuel Wade, arriving just days before the United States opened the land.^5,6 Wade and William Clark are the first Euro-Americans known to have come to the Paonia area to settle, and they platted the town and received approval for it in 1882.¹ Wade opened the first mercantile store and kept the first post office inside it, serving as postmaster himself.^1,6 Wade had brought peony roots to Colorado and submitted “Paeonia,” the Latin name for peonies, as the town name, and either his misread handwriting or the post office’s objection to the extra vowel made it Paonia.² A pioneer account in Colorado Magazine gives an earlier spelling, Peona, from the peony flower, later changed to Paonia, while the 1941 state guide says only that the name came from the peony common in the region in early days.^6,7

Orchards, Coal, and the 1902 Railroad

In 1882 Samuel Wade, Enos Hotchkiss, and W.S. Coburn shipped several thousand root-grafts into the country and set up the nurseries that began the North Fork fruit industry.⁵ Paonia peaches from the irrigated orchards won awards at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.¹ Paonia incorporated in 1902, the same year the Denver and Rio Grande opened a line through town to Somerset, bringing more settlers and an efficient means to move the harvest to market.^1,3 The Colorado Business Directory counted 500 residents in 1903 and 1000 in 1905 and called the area the “best fruit growing belt of the West.”¹ The byway marker says the region from Paonia to Somerset produces high quality, low-sulfur coal, and that the railroad’s arrival in the early 1900s opened several mines.³ In 1941 the state guide found Paonia, at 5,696 feet and 958 people, the chief supply center for a horticultural and agricultural area, with extensive coal mining also carried on.⁷

Grand Avenue and the Bross Hotel

Ed Curtis founded the First National Bank, whose sandstone building went up in 1903 at 226 Grand Avenue, laid by the local stonemasons Al Hurst and Sege Stratton.^8,9 The Grand Avenue marker says it was one of two banks in early Paonia, with the Fruit Exchange Bank, and the only one to survive the Great Depression.⁸ W. T. Bross, twice sheriff of Chase County, moved his family to Paonia in 1900 and opened his hotel in May 1906.¹ It lodged Paonia visitors, investors, and fruit brokers, and the Paonia Chamber of Commerce was initiated at a meeting of retail merchants there in 1927.¹ When W. T. Bross died in 1921 his youngest son, Otto, managed the hotel, and in 1930, after the stock market crashed, Otto Bross converted it to a rooming house.¹ The older Paonia Hotel, owned by the McNaughton siblings from 1899, had deteriorated by 1982 and was torn down to make way for the new Town Hall.¹ Julie Andrew bought the Bross in 1994 and renovated it as a bed and breakfast, and it reopened in 1997.¹

High Country News Comes to Paonia

The board of High Country News, a biweekly newsmagazine, chose Ed and Betsy Marston, then living in Paonia, to take it over; they had come from New York in 1974, he a physics professor and she a television news journalist.¹⁰ In the summer of 1983 the paper came from Lander to Paonia in a pickup truck carrying an addressing machine, a photo file, and the subscribers list, and the staff settled into a former Seventh Day Adventist Church downtown.¹⁰ By 2001, when Ed Marston stepped down as publisher, circulation had grown to more than 20,000, up from 3,000 in 1984.¹⁰