The Auntie Stone Cabin is a two-story cabin and a classic example of American frontier log construction. Sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth "Auntie" Stone and her second husband, Lewis, arrived in this area in 1864 after receiving Army permission to build a private residence on the Fort Collins military reservation. The cabin later served as the Officers Mess until the fort closed in 1867, and it is the only surviving structure among the twenty-two buildings of the original military fort. In later years it functioned as the town's first school, hotel, boarding house, and private residence. After Lewis died, Auntie Stone's widowed niece, Elizabeth Keays, moved into the cabin with her, and in an 1866 diary entry Keays wrote of her private room's ingrain carpet, nice bed, window, sunset view, hills, and the pretty Cache-a-la-Poudre. With the aid of Henry Clay Peterson, Auntie Stone established the area's first gristmill and brickyard. A cherished and respected businesswoman, she also worked for the suffrage movement and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, contributing greatly to the community's moral and economic quality until her death at age ninety-four in 1895.

Photo: Mike Stroud

Photo: Auntie Stone Cabin Marker, Fort Collins Museum

Photo: Mike Stroud

Photo: Mike Stroud

Fort Collins, Colorado · USA