79 Years Ago
We are going to have our Thanksgiving Day Dinner with an octogenarian. This will be Lake Smith’s 83rd Thanksgiving day–that’s almost half of all the Thanksgiving days since the United States of American became a nation in 1776.
The Colorado Transcript – November 22, 1945
Lake Erie Smith came to Golden to visit an aunt in 1870, and returned the following year to marry W.G. Smith–son of the Presbyterian minister, editor of the Golden Globe, and former lieutenant governor of Colorado. The couple had 3 daughters and a son, and by the time she died in 1957 she also had 9 grandchildren and 3 great grandchildren.
Mrs. Smith lived in only two houses in her lifetime–the one in Iowa, where she was born, and the one she shared with her husband at 13th and Arapahoe. The Golden house began as a modest bungalow, but the couple added on as they added children and over time it became quite large and stately. Mrs. Smith enjoyed young people, and after her husband’s death in 1921 she rented rooms to Mines students. She was quite involved in the Presbyterian church, and hosted many church socials in her yard, in the shade of the trees that she and her husband had planted decades before.
Beautiful as the house was, the land beneath it was even more valuable. Shortly after Lake’s death, the City cut down the trees next to the house. They needed to widen Arapahoe Street to add diagonal parking. The following year, Mr. Foss bought the house so he could make a parking lot for Foss Drug customers. Even today, the north half of that parking lot belongs to the city, but the south half still belongs to the Foss family.
Thank you to Wendy Weiman for sponsoring Golden History Moments for the month of November.
