Monday, September 28, 2026

St. Charles elects officers in McGaa's lodge and still has almost no town

1858 · McGaa's lodge on the South Platte, Kansas Territory

Four days after nine men signed St. Charles into existence on the east bank of Cherry Creek, they met in William McGaa's lodge on the Platte and elected a full slate. Adnah French became president. The town still had more officers than buildings.

The papers of Sept. 24 had already claimed a square mile and borrowed a constitution. The bylaws said officers would wait until the 28th. So they waited, then walked over to McGaa's lodge — a trader's place, not a marble hall — and held the kind of meeting you hold when the town exists mostly in a memorandum book.

French took the chair. McGaa, the man who could talk to the Cheyenne and Arapaho who actually used the flats, was named vice president. T. C. Dickson got the secretary's book. John S. Smith, the other trader in the company, took the treasury. Frank M. Cobb was recorder. Hartley, Nichols, William Smith, and J. A. Churchill filled the trustee seats. Nichols had already won the name fight: St. Charles, after the Missouri river town he knew, not Golden City.

They surveyed a few lines, posted notices, and kept headquarters at Montana City a few miles upriver. In early October most of them decided the claim was safe enough to leave for Lawrence. It was not. Charles Nichols came back to finish a cabin and found other parties already camped on the square mile. On Nov. 22 William Larimer's Leavenworth crowd filed Denver City on top of the empty east bank and named it for a Kansas governor who had not asked for the honor.

The creek did not care which letterhead won. Downtown is still that square mile. The first officers of record were chosen on this date, in a lodge, for a town that would last two months and then keep every street.

If you are looking for a cornerstone, this is the meeting minutes version. The cabin came later. The jump came after that.

Sources: Hall — History of the State of Colorado, St. Charles minutes · American History Central — Colorado Gold Rush · Wikipedia — Timeline of Denver · Denver Visitor — Sept. 24, 1858 papers

Ruth Stonehouse is born in Denver, then directs the pictures she is tired of starring in

1892 · Denver and Teller County

Ruth Stonehouse was born in Denver on Sept. 28, 1892. By 1900 the census had her in Lawrence, the Teller County camp above Cripple Creek, with a sign-painter father. She danced at eight, acted in more than a hundred silent films, and in 1917 started directing the ones that would not let her be anything but the little girl.

James Wesley Stonehouse painted signs. Georgia Worster kept the other half of the household. The 1900 count puts Ruth and her younger sister Hazel in Lawrence Town with their father and grandmother Eda — gold-camp Colorado, not the 16th Street version. Studio copy later called her a daughter of Victor. The birth record stays in Denver. Both can be true in a state that keeps moving people uphill.

She was on Arizona stages as a child dancer. Chicago got the teenager: magazine stories, a newspaper desk, then Essanay, where Broncho Billy's company needed faces that photographed. From 1911 to 1928 she worked Triangle, Universal, Metro, Fox, and whoever else would print a still. The count usually lands around 140 pictures. She played opposite Francis X. Bushman and, in the serial years, opposite whatever plot required a nurse, a waif, or a girl who could ride.

The little-girl parts wore out. In 1917 she wrote and directed a string of one-reelers for Universal — Daredevil Dan, A Walloping Time, The Winning Pair, A Limb of Satan, Tacky Sue's Romance — and put herself in front of her own camera when that was the deal. The Women Film Pioneers Project still files her there, in the short list of women who got a director's chair before the talkies closed the door.

She married the writer Joseph Roach, divorced him, married Felix Hughes, and died in Hollywood on May 12, 1941, of a cerebral hemorrhage, at 48. Forest Lawn took the interment. Stonehouse Signs, her father's shop, is still a Colorado company. The films are the part that needs a projector and a little patience. She was a Denver birthdate who learned the mountains first and the close-up later.

Sources: Wikipedia — Ruth Stonehouse · Women Film Pioneers Project · Silent Era — Ruth Stonehouse · Find a Grave — Ruth Stonehouse

The 15-inch September clock stops, then the date files 92, 21, and a sky full of mountain smoke

1936 · Denver

From 6 p.m. on Sept. 27, 1936, to 6 p.m. on the 28th, Denver measured 15 inches of snow, still the heaviest 24-hour September total on the books. The same square on the calendar has a 92-degree afternoon (2010), a 21-degree morning (1985), and, in 1877, mountain-fire smoke thick enough to hide the sun.

Yesterday's brief already walked through the 1936 storm: leaves on the trees, $7 million in 1936 damage, grade-schoolers sent home at noon on this date. The statistic that belongs to the 28th is the clock. Fifteen inches in twenty-four hours, downtown. The official high that afternoon was only 34 after a stretch of rain ate some of the depth. Greatest snow on the ground downtown had been 13 inches. Warm air followed and took almost all of it before October.

The date kept practicing. In 1959 rain on the 28th turned to wet snow overnight; Stapleton finished the storm with 10.6 inches, trees still in leaf, one death from a falling limb and four from the shovel. In 1985 the metro took 8 to 12 inches of powder and the official low on this evening hit 21, the coldest this calendar square has ever been. In 1984 the high was 34, tying the lowest maximum. In 2012 an EF-0 scribbled itself near Strasburg and hurt nothing.

Then there is the other sky. On Sept. 28, 1877, dense smoke from mountain forest fires spread over the city and obscured the sun at times. Denver has been rehearsing that particular afternoon ever since, with better satellites and the same lungs.

Hottest official reading for the date: 92 in 2010. Next are a cluster of 89s, including 2024. Wettest liquid day: 1.77 inches in 1936, which was the snow pretending to be rain for an hour. The average high is about 73. Pack the layer you can peel at lunch. This date has already closed a September blizzard, opened another, frozen the grass, and hidden the sun without changing its name.

Sources: NWS Boulder public information statement · NWS notes via ThorntonWeather · Extreme Weather Watch — Denver Sept. 28 · WeatherBug — 1959 Front Range snow