Three downtown businesses and one home on North Street have been added to the city of Cortez Register of Historic Structures, Sites and Districts.
The Cortez City Council on Tuesday voted unanimously to designate four properties as historic places. They are Slavens True Value Hardware, 237 W. Main St.; Main Street Brewery and Restaurant, 21 E. Main St.; Brand Central, 111-113 E. Main St.; and the Calkins and Merlo House, 202 W. North St. The four buildings will join 45 other historic properties that have been added to the city register since the ordinance was created in 2011.
The designation is intended to assist historic preservation, promote local history and allow property owners to access preservation programs. Buildings must be 50 years old and must meet historic criteria.
The city’s register is separate from the Colorado State Register of Historic Properties and the National Register of Historic Places. Cortez associate planner Neva Connolly said the state and federal registers have stricter guidelines for any change to historic buildings.
“Our ordinance was set up so that people, residents, could list their properties but still make changes without having to adhere to the more stringent standards of the federal register,” Connolly said.
David Scates said those regulations initially deterred him from applying to list his property, now called Brand Central, on the city register. He said Linda Towle of the Cortez Historic Preservation Board has asked him for several years if he’d like to put his building on the register.
“I’ve resisted it strongly because I didn’t want someone to tell me what to do with my building, and since then I’ve just kind of mellowed out,” Scates said.
Scates has owned the building at 111-113 E. Main St. since 2002. He recently changed the name of the business to Brand Central, but the historic name is Brubaker’s Lumber. It also has been Bru’s House of Color.
According to an inventory from the Colorado Cultural Resource Survey, the location was a lumberyard and hardware store beginning in 1910. In 1952, L.R. Peterson built the current building. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Charles E. Brubaker family and Cortez Lumber and Hardware operated out of the building, and in the 1970s, it became a paint store.
The large, two-story brick building seems unremarkable at first, but a closer look reveals a decorative Southwest pattern in the exterior brickwork. According to the report, the decorative brick was “a technique often employed to set the stylistic character of commercial and smaller industrial buildings during the late 1940s and early 1950s.”
“The special thing about the brick design on the outside is the Southwest design incorporated in the brickwork,” Scates said. “Very unique and very interesting-looking, I think.”
One block west, the Main Street Brewery and Restaurant also displays themes of the Southwest. The building inventory states the portico, supported by five wooden posts and tipped with visible rafters, is meant to resemble Las Vegas. Susan and Rudolph Baeumel own the building today.
“We started the brewery back in ’95, and we ran it for 15 years,” Susan Baeumel said. “It’s a nice old building, and we just wanted to put it on the historic registry.”
According to the building inventory, the structure was built in 1929. It was used as retail and a restaurant throughout World War II. After the war, it was split between a Coast to Coast hardware store and a restaurant. Since the 1990s, it has been used as a microbrewery and restaurant.
Three more blocks west, Slavens True Value Hardware has been serving locals since 1937.
General Manager Jim Olson, who has worked there for 25 years, touted the store’s employees and Slavens family legacy.
“People come here because we’ve been here,” Olson said.
According to the inventory, the first portion of the building was built in 1937 by the Jett family and was used as a hardware and lumber store. Basil and Estie Slavens purchased the property and company in 1953 and built the current building in 1958.
In the late 1950s, the building had three storefronts: Nerhood’s Furniture, Slavens Hardware and Campbell’s Appliances. The Slavens family eventually took over the other two businesses. Gary Slavens is the fourth generation of his family to own the store.
The fourth building in this series of additions to the city’s historic register is the Calkins and Merlo House, now owned by Karen and James Mischke, at 202 W. North St. The historical background in the building inventory states the home is named after two notable men who lived in the home.
Dr. Royal William Calkins, a medical doctor from Jones County, Iowa, built the home in 1909. He lived in the home with his wife and son until 1912, when they moved to a ranch outside Cortez.
Calkins was a beloved doctor. During an flu epidemic in 1918, Calkins treated 462 people when the other doctor in Cortez became ill.
Outside of his medical practice, Calkins served on the Colorado State Legislature from 1920 to 1931 and was speaker of the House of Representatives from 1929 to 1931. The Cortez School Board in 1950 named a city school after him.
Calkins died in 1961. His daughters, Verna and Margaret, sold the home their father built to Sam and Grace Merlo in 1969.
Sam Merlo was a war hero. In 1940, at age 18, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and in World War II completed 23 combat missions in B-17s over Germany. During his 24th mission, in 1944, his plane was shot down ,and he was captured and taken to Stalag Luft III, the German prisoner of war camp depicted in the movie “The Great Escape” and the book “The Wooden Horse.”
Merlo and his fellow prisoners were liberated in 1945 by Gen. George Patton. He received two Purple Hearts and retired from the Air Corps in 1946. He then returned to Cortez and practiced law from 1955 to 1995.
The City Council approved the four additions to the historic register Tuesday night without much discussion, and there were no public comments.
“Another successful addition to the register,” Mayor Karen Sheek said.
sdolan@the-journal.com