Preserving Our Heritage

In 1997, the people of Montrose, Colorado, sought to document and record the history of the region and town so later generations would know what had gone before. Among the places recalled were First National Bank at 400 E. Main, where the southeast corner had been occupied by the Montrose County Bank, chartered as First National Bank in 1889 with I.B. Townsend as its first president; its building with a spired cupola became a community landmark before it was completely rebuilt in 1968. At 347 E. Main, Buddecke and Diehl Outfitting Company occupied the northwest corner of Main and Cascade in the 1880s as a major freighting firm supplying mining towns and hauling ore to the railroad in Montrose by wagons pulled by oxen or mules, and the first municipal water system also began there with a hand-dug well, a hand-windlass, rope, and moss-covered bucket, a nearby wooden trough for animals, and Jim Donnelly's early water-distribution service using a burro carrying two barrels of alkali-free water for Montrose households. At 401 E. Main, Joseph Selig and Otto Mears met Montrose's need for a hotel in 1883 when Mears erected a two-story rough-lumber "palace hotel" with canvas-partitioned rooms and a lower level filled with gaming devices; later known as Lott's Hotel after O.D. Loutsenhizer purchased it, it sent out three stagecoaches daily with mail and passengers bound south for the mining towns of the San Juan Mountains until the hotel and adjoining buildings burned in 1897. The Krebs and Mabry Building was then constructed at 401 E. Main in 1898, housing a dry goods store, a millinery shop, and the Home State Bank on the main floor with furnished rooms upstairs; the Montrose National Bank, first organized in 1898 as The Western Slope Bank, moved there in 1922, and the building was demolished in 1974 and replaced with the present structure.

Montrose, Colorado · United States