Simla Days

On Labor Day weekend the tents go up in Simla Town Park. For the 2026 edition, Sunday and Monday, September 6 and 7, the park was lined with booths, food stands and a beer garden. Mayor Ryan Fulmer, who organized the event, listed the vendors: “the Elbert County Republicans and Democrats along with several candidate tents, plus booths selling honey, soap, bread, knives, women’s self-defense items, chainsaw carvings and demonstrations, lemonade, coffee, kettle corn, street corn, jewelry and Pokemon cards.” The Simla Historical Society and a crepe seller were there too. For children there were a bounce house, train rides, games and face painting.

The Town of Simla runs the celebration from its town hall at 323 Pueblo Avenue. The town counted 601 people in the 2020 census. U.S. 24 passes through it, running southwest 48 miles to Colorado Springs and northeast 24 miles to Limon, and Big Sandy Creek flows east to the north of town. The elevation is 5,978 feet by the federal figure and 5,997 by the town’s. Fulmer estimated that about 500 people came in 2026.

Supper in the park and a band called Cats in Boots

The 2026 program opened Sunday at 4:00 p.m. with a cornhole tournament in the Town Park. Teams of any skill level could enter, and the mayor both ran the tournament and played in it. The community dinner followed at 6:00, cooked by Big Nip’s Blazen Pit Barbecue. At 7:00 the band Cats in Boots played. “It went as good as we could have imagined,” Fulmer said afterward. “The public came, they had fun, the vendors showed up. The band was awesome. It just couldn’t have gone better.”

Brisket, ringers and a five-minute jail

Monday’s program started at 9 a.m. Teams from the Colorado BBQ Network and other pitmasters competed in three categories: chicken, ribs and brisket. For $10, anyone could sample food from every competitor and vote for a favorite. The overall champion in 2026 was Que’s Your Daddy, which won two belt buckles and a cash prize.

Horseshoe play began at about 1:00 p.m. at Small Park, at Deer Street and Navajo Avenue. Depending on how many players signed up, the tournament ran singles, doubles, or both.

The Big Sandy Fire Protection District held its own Labor Day barbecue at the fire station. It offered an obstacle course, a tractor pull, a Flight for Life helicopter and a “jail.” A resident could pay to have someone arrested and held for five minutes. The senior class held its fundraising auction there as well; in 2026 that was the Class of 2027. A silent auction ran alongside. Crystal Davis, the district’s EMS captain, described the crowd: “the great-grandparents down to the great-great-grandkids, watching them all come together and support the community and be able to sit down and enjoy some food together.”

The Simla Historical Society’s booth had information on Wreaths Across America 2026 and several printed yearbooks to page through. It also asked anyone with local history to donate or share it. The society works from 504 Washington Avenue and covers Simla and nearby towns such as Agate, Matheson, Calhan, Fondis and Kutch. After the 2026 celebration it posted thanks to “my mom & my aunt,” who helped set up the booth, sat with the keeper all day, and took it down.

A helicopter on Sioux Avenue

In 2021 the celebration fell on Labor Day itself. Pueblo Avenue was closed to traffic to make room for nearly a dozen vendors, and children rode through the park in a Simla Cubs train. The Cubs are the teams of Big Sandy High School in Simla.

Dominick Black was one of the 2021 coordinators. He had served seven years on the Board of Trustees and had worked on Simla Days since moving from Denver nearly a decade earlier. “It lets everybody in town touch base and gives the kids a chance to come out and play,” he said. “Some people even come from Calhan, Elbert, and Kiowa.”

At the head of the park that year stood the tent of Dancing Jaguar Coffee, a new business from the nearby town of Elbert. Its owners, Joe and Erika Hulm, import beans from Erika’s 50-year-old family farm in Honduras. “Tips and one dollar from each bag of coffee sold go toward helping fund a school on the farm for local children,” Joe Hulm said. Charlotte Stafford of KoDraHealing LLC sold soaps and lip balms made with essential oils. Nancy McJunkin of Phoenix Scents sold candles, handmade textiles and jewelry. The Simla branch of the Pines & Plains Library gave away books and ran that year’s cornhole tournament.

At about 10:45 a.m. a bright orange medical helicopter landed on Sioux Avenue in front of the Big Sandy Fire Protection building. Visitors talked with the Flight for Life nurses and pilots and sat in the cockpit. Beside the helicopter, small children in firefighter uniforms ran an obstacle course. They worked through tires and tubes, rescued pretend victims, and put out flameless fires. “I had fun,” said four-year-old Ilijah Mease of Simla. “My favorite part was putting out the fire.”

A name out of a book on India

Sources differ on how long the celebration has run. The 2026 newspaper account calls Simla Days a tradition of roughly 15 years. The Elbert County Historical Society’s fall 2011 newsletter, however, records the society’s informational booth at Simla Days that season, with displays of old tools and a drawing for a $15 museum gift certificate. The Simla Days winner was Kitty Whitworth of Ramah. In 2012 the celebration was held in early summer, June 23 and 24, to mark the town’s 100th anniversary, with a tractor pull, kids’ games, a band, vendors and a car show.

The anniversary dated from incorporation on January 15, 1912. The town’s own account says Simla began in the late 1890s as a stop on the Rock Island line and was founded in 1909. Wikipedia credits the 1909 founding to a man named Altman and says the area was settled in the 1880s. The historical society tells the story of the name this way: the daughter of a Rock Island Railroad superintendent was reading a book on India and chose the name of the hill town of Simla. Wikipedia calls her father a railroad official.

Simla’s first newspaper started in 1911. According to the historical society, during the 1930s the town was a leading shipping point for pinto beans in the Pikes Peak area. Wikipedia, in an uncited passage, calls it a center for shipping the area’s potato harvest. The town’s account says agriculture sustained Simla for most of a century, and in the 1970s local businesses and light manufacturing did well.

The railroad that named the town is gone. A 1994 National Register nomination for the depot at Calhan counted at least nine Rock Island depots that once stood between Colorado Springs and the Kansas line. It reported that Simla’s depot had been sold and moved to Strasburg, where it became a private house sheathed in brick, “thus obscuring almost all identifying characteristics of the depot.”