Pioneer Day

On the last Saturday of September, Grand Avenue in Norwood gives over its morning to a coronation. At 10:30 a.m. on September 26, 2026, Jeanne Yamnitz was to be crowned Pioneer Day Queen there, with her husband, Gary, as king, under the theme “The Hands that Forged Wright’s Mesa.” The San Miguel Basin Forum counted it the town’s 90th Pioneer Day. The parade lined up at Norwood Town Hall at 10:15 and went down the main street at 11. Pioneer Day royalty and their families ride in a stagecoach that once served Telluride as a school bus and carried passengers from the train depot to the hotels. In the Norwood Chamber of Commerce’s account, the coach still serves as a carriage for royalty “to this day.”

Dinner at noon, a dance at The Livery

The 2026 program followed the old order. The chuckwagon dinner began at noon, sponsored that year by Norwood FFA. A car show ran on Grand Avenue from noon to 4 p.m., sponsored by Norwood Pit Stop. Street games began at 1:30 on Norwood High School’s football field. In the evening, the family dance ran from 7 to 10 at The Livery, with a cash bar and the band New Vision. A post on the festival’s page that night described them: “New Vision is a 6 piece band, if you enjoy country and Waylon, you better get down to The Livery. It’s starting to hop!” The weekend had opened the day before with the Maverick Color Run, which started at 10 a.m. at Norwood Fairgrounds Park, with runners entering on the west side by the grandstand. Afterward the organizers wrote, “It was a beautiful September day for the parade the street games the car show wrapped up by a dance.”

The Forum listed the 2026 sponsors as the Town of Norwood, the Norwood Study Club, the Norwood Chamber of Commerce of Wright’s Mesa, the Norwood Park and Recreation District, and Norwood Pit Stop. The Chamber’s history also names the Rodeo Club among the groups that keep the day going. It adds that Study Club members have dwindled over the years, though the club still organizes the celebration.

A queen from Wilson Mesa

Jeanne Yamnitz has ranched her whole life. Her family on Wright’s Mesa goes back to the early 1900s, when her great-great-grandfather came as a teenager from Missouri to the Coventry area. Her father, Edwin Jacobs, was born on the family ranch in 1916. His brother Albert Jacobs, to whom Jeanne was close, was born at Mailbox in 1914, and some of Albert’s photographs hang in Norwood businesses. Jeanne and her twin, Joanne, were born while their father lay in the hospital with a leg broken when he tipped a tractor over. The twins were named for their grandmothers.

She was in 4-H from age 9 to 18. A dress she sewed won grand champion at the county fair in Norwood, and she modeled it at the state fair, where it took a blue ribbon. “As kids growing up, we spent a lot of time on Wilson Mesa riding,” she told the Forum. “My dad at that point had sheep.” The family moved sheep up one side of the mountain and down the other and carried food to the herder. She rode Henrietta, and Babe, another family favorite. Her grandparents took their children by wagon to camp at Beaver Park for weeks at a time. Her grandfather fished there, and her grandmother cooked on a wood stove. “She made bread and cookies and wonderful meals,” Yamnitz said. “You have to know the different woods and the heat you get (on those).”

The couple came back to Norwood in 1979, when Gary agreed to take over the family ranch. They have raised beef for nearly 50 years. “It’s a terrible drought situation,” Jeanne said. “We don’t have the water and hay to feed as many cows as we used to have.” The two were married at the courthouse in Telluride by the justice of the peace, and there is no photograph of their wedding day. A few years before her own crowning, she and Bernice White served as attendants to Queen Linda Porter. For 2026 she planned to wear either that attendant’s dress or a new one. She also expected to wear a Black Hills Gold brooch from her grandmother, who lived in Custer, South Dakota. “This is an honor for us,” she told the Forum.

Ten below at Placerville

The Chamber writes that Pioneer Day commemorates “the brave men and women who endured the hardships of frontier life on Wright’s Mesa and around the region.” The Utes were the mesa’s first people, and they camped, fished, hunted, and gathered there for thousands of years. Legend has it that in 1877 two placer miners, working down the San Miguel River from Telluride, climbed out of the canyon to look at the country above. They saw grassland reaching to the horizon, and from the rim they could see all the way to Utah. Word spread. F. E. Wright filed on two 80-acre parcels at the Land Office in Lake City. He then sold the southern one, which had a spring that flowed year round, to Edwin Joseph for $100. Joseph ran a weigh station at the foot of Keystone Hill near Telluride.

No road reached the mesa then, only a cow trail from Placerville along the river. The morning the Josephs left Placerville it was 10 degrees below zero. They crossed the river at Specie Creek, went over Specie Mesa, and arrived by pack train. In 1886 they became the first pioneer family to settle Wright’s Mesa. Mail for them and for Wright hung in a sack on a tree or a landmark stump, which is how Mailbox Park got its name. Harry Copp came in the spring of 1885 and named the townsite Norwood after his hometown in Missouri. He became its first mayor and postmaster. In 1886 he built its first structure, a log building that held the post office and general store and was the only lodging for overnight visitors. Cowboys leaving town, the Chamber’s history says, commonly made their horses buck the full length of Main Street. The town’s first ordinance required them to check their guns and hunting knives at the livery or the town hall.

A chorus club and a stagecoach

On November 13, 1928, a group of Norwood women met to form a chorus club. Its objectives, in the Chamber’s words, were “to improve themselves, and to foster and maintain a desirable community.” In 1929 the women added a study club and joined the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the group later became the Norwood Federated Women’s Club. In time its fundraising helped bring a doctor and a hospital to the mesa.

The study club championed the first pioneer festival in 1935. There was a parade in the morning and a chuck wagon dinner at noon. Five local men dressed as cowboys arrived in the chuck wagon and played hillbilly music. That same year the club acquired the stagecoach from Telluride Transfer and kept it in a member’s barn. In 1938 the club opened Norwood’s first library in a homestead cabin donated by Mr. and Mrs. Steve Herndon and moved from Oak Hill. Its homemade wooden shelves were painted bright red. In 1939 the women bought Copp’s old Log Cabin for $50. Club members, schoolchildren, and townspeople took down the logs and rebuilt the cabin on Lucerne Street, and the women did the chinking themselves. Also in 1939, they repaired and painted the stagecoach and drove it in the Pioneer Day parade for the first time.

There was no Pioneer Day in 1942, 1943, or 1944. The women spent the war years gathering materials for the war effort. In 1950 a kitchen and restrooms were added to the Log Cabin so the chuck wagon dinner could be cooked there. The cabin, the oldest building in Norwood, now houses the town’s Historical Museum.

Pennies in jars

Royalty came in 1952, when the town began honoring its old-timers. That year’s first queen, Anne Snyder, and her companions Judy Oliver and Nadyne Mock were high school students. Townspeople voted by dropping pennies into donation jars at local businesses. Anne’s great-grandfather Tom Swain had kept the first store in Paradox. In 1955 the king and queen were Horace and Pearl Joseph. Horace was known as the pioneer child born in San Miguel County to Edwin Joseph’s family. In 1964 Governor John Love and his wife attended, along with Congressman Wayne Aspinall and Mrs. Aspinall, and the governor crowned Queen Mary Wilson. In 1971 the Chamber hosted street games, the Study Club fed more than 300 people at the chuck wagon dinner, Norwood firemen staged a water fight, and a dance closed the night. On September 29, 1972, Queen Louise (Palmer) Robinson and her family appeared on radio and television.

In 2004 the crowns went to Doyle and Janet Irvine. In 1962 they had joined the Hodges, Herndon, and Tessman families to open Ski Dallas, on Dallas Divide between Placerville and Ridgway. It ran until 1976. A day’s lift ticket cost $1.25, or $5.00 for the whole family.