Wells House & Boulder County Poor Farm | Fort Chambers/Poor Farm Site Information

Wells/Chambers House and the Boulder County Poor Farm

The Queen Anne Victorian style house on the property, known as the Wells House and/or Boulder County Poor Farm, is an iconic Boulder County countryside landmark. The house and adjacent area is registered in the National Register of Historic Places. It has not been occupied since 2016 and needs significant repair and maintenance.

Inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places

In 2001, the house and 19 other structures, buildings, sites or objects on site were determined eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion A, C and D (see below).

The site is considered significant for its association with the Sand Creek Massacre, the development of agriculture in the Boulder Valley, the operation of the Boulder County Poor Farm, and the architectural character of the farmstead. Listing on the National Register affords no legal protection from demolition or other insensitive alterations unless the project has federal government involvement. The listing is a way to record the property’s official history and is considered an honorary distinction.

What does it mean to have a site placed on the NRHP?

The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. It was authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and is part of the National Park Service’s program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate and protect America’s historic and archaeological resources. The purpose of the nomination was to record the history and determine eligibility of the structure for its appropriateness to be placed on the National Register. Potential listings are judged under four criteria:

A. The property must be associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history;

B. The property must be associated with the lives of persons significant in our past;

C. The property must embody distinctive characteristics of a type, period or method of construction, represent the work of a master, possess high artistic values, or represent a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction;

D. The property must show, or may be likely to yield, information important to history or prehistory.

The original portion of the house is on the north side and was likely constructed after 1870 using bricks that George Chambers may have made at his own brickyard on the property of Judge Peter M. Housel (Boulder County News 1870b, 1870c). In 1882 the Chambers sold the house to William F. and Sarah A. Hunter (BCC&R 2022 [1882]: Rec. #: 8070134).

In 1897, the property was sold to John and Lucy A. Williams who added the larger, Queen Anne Victorian-style portion of the house in 1897 (Boulder Daily Camera 1897b).

In 1902, the Williams family sold the property to the County for use as a poor farm. In 1904, a two-story dormitory wing was added on the eastern elevation. The dormitory was used to house inmates and reportedly included steel security doors that allowed inmates to be locked in their rooms (Mary Wells Oral History, 1986).

In 1920 Paul and Geneva Hummel purchased the property. Shortly after acquiring the farm, Mr. Hummel reportedly tore down the old dormitory (Mary Wells Oral History, 1986).

In 1902, Boulder County purchased this property (120 acres) to use as the Boulder County Poor Farm. The property was purchased from Lucy A. Williams for $14,000 and included 1 1/2 shares of stock in the North Boulder Farmers Ditch, as well as all water and ditch rights (BCC&R 2022 [1920] Rec. #:900144644). Researcher Anne Quinby Dyni summarized modifications to the property in her report History of the Boulder County Poor Farm and Hospital:

"Although a large brick home already stood on the property, modifications were needed to convert it to an institution. According to Mary Hummel Wells whose father Paul Hummel purchased the property in 1920, the cellar was remodeled into a kitchen. A dumbwaiter transported meals to an upstairs apartment at the rear of the main house, presumably for the superintendent’s family. The inmates ate in a dining area at the west end of the cellar."

The Poor Farm is described in a Boulder Daily Camera news article:

“The building is a substantial structure and in the center of a farm of high degree of productiveness, where the county's unfortunates are supposed to work enough to supply themselves with such luxuries as fruits and vegetables. The man on the ladder is Jos. McCabe and he is illustrating to a party including photographer “Rocky Mountain Joe” and the county commissioner how the new water works of the farm afford ample protection from fire. The water shoots high into the air as Sturtevant has caught it. The water system was put in by McCabe & Wise of the Boulder plumbing and machine shops.”

The referenced photo included on the right or below, depending on your device.

The Poor Farm is described in a June Longmont Ledger news article:

“...120 acres, part of the land being used for a large garden, part for hay and the balance pasture. D. C. McPeek and his good wife are managing the place and have done so the past four years. The inmates at present number about twenty-five, only one of which is a woman...” “The building is large and commodious. The lower floor being of concrete. There is good fire protection consisting of four hydrants with hose close at hand. Water for the house comes first from a ditch that is never empty even in winter. The water is filtered in a big tank 28 feet long and 6 feet in diameter, holding 6000 gallons, though it goes into a cistern 14 feet deep first. The building is lighted with acetylene gas made on the premises.” “The place covers a quarter section, a large part of which is under a high state of cultivation. Superintendent D. H. McPeek says that the poor cost Boulder County about $3200 a year net last year, inclusive of some betterments about the place.”

And in September in a Boulder Daily Camera article:

“It has 28 inmates at the present time and among them are some very interesting characters—decrepit old men, all but one of them, some feeble mentally, ill with infirmities. The home was purchased of John Williams a few years ago and has been enlarged by the addition, just a peep of which is given in this illustration. This is the dormitory and is 34 by 64 feet in size. The place is lighted by acetelyn gas and has a fine air-compressor water power plant which provides water ample to drown any blaze that may occur. The inmates have their own hobbies and some of them work them out on the ranch.”

The County stopped using this property as the County Poor Farm in 1918. Dyni shares more about this change for the institution:

“By 1918, the 120-acre poor farm had become burdensome to the county and more modern facilities were needed. Whether the practice of inmate labor to work the farm land was no longer a viable concept, or whether the basic patient profile had changed, records do not show…the Valmont property was sold that fall [in 1918]”

In September 1918, the county sold the entire farm to farmer William A. Smith for $26,000 (BCC&R 2022 [1918] Rec. #: 90136362; Longmont Ledger 1918). The inmates of the Poor Farm were transferred to a new combination county poor farm and hospital facility located near present day North Broadway (Dyni 1992: 7).

Wells: “I understand it that it was a mud, adobe fort and when my dad started trying to break up the alfalfa fields down there – course, we always had horses, we never had tractors until WWII, we always farmed with horses, great big Percheon stallions and dandy mares – …Dad hooked on a second team, came up and got a second team, he said ‘I cannot figure out why I cannot get them to plow.’ And so he took the second team, and a four-team set of horses finally pulled these huge, huge – they were bigger than any telephone pole you’ve seen – the corner posts to the Fort Chambers out, and he kept them all those years. And when he was older, he gave it to the Boulder Historical Society, and I understand it went up in the fire.”

Dyni: “When did he dig up those posts, do you know?”

Wells: “We came in 1920. I would guess that probably that was 2 1/2 or 3 years afterwards. I would think that was about right. I was either 3 or 4 when he did that.”

Dyni: “So that land really hadn’t been tilled until your dad…”

Wells: “Not too much, not deeply”

"[The Poor Farm kitchen] was a room in the basement without any windows, they had a great big stove – I can show you the stovepipe hole – and I don’t know how anybody would cook down there without any windows but they did. And their dining room was the west end of our basement, and they had a dumb waiter that pulled on ropes up to this back bedroom in the corner…I can’t believe that as fancy as the front part of the house is that it could’ve been for inmates ‘cause I assume they all lived out there. Maybe they didn’t, I don’t know, but I would assume that maybe they treated the managers very well and catered their food, that’s all I can figure out.”

“I didn’t, of course, know any [inmates], really, but I was a year and a half old when we came here and I can well remember for, I probably even up to the time I was four years old and maybe a little older…there was a little old man, he was as nice as he could be, and he had snow white hair and he would come plugging in the driveway with his cane thinking that he had come home, and then he wouldn’t have the energy to go back over on Broadway where the County Poor Farm moved…and then Mother would have to call and they’d come after him in a little Model T Ford, I can just see the car…”

When asked, "What did your dad raise on this place?"

“First year he came he tried sugar beets but he didn’t have too much success. Then he mainly raised hay and corn and ground the corn into insulage. Several years he ran a thrashing machine and he was the first guy that ever ran a cook shack – nobody had ever heard of that courtesy. They had a coal stove in the cook shack and an ice box; Mother and I spent our summers (I was, by that time, 13/14), and we hauled the hundred pounds of potatoes and the what-have-you to the cook shack, wherever it was over around Niwot. If they were gonna move, the cook would just fix a roast or somethin’ she could keep on the stove – I dunno how they did but, in the oven, maybe – and they’d be pulling it with two horses and the smoke would be comin’ out the chimney and they’d be cookin’, they’d have supper.”

“I would assume at least the county poor farm put [the big red barn] up if it wasn’t there before. And the smokehouse was here, originally, and Michaels used to smoke their hams…in fact, Dad was still trying to do it when my husband came from Italy, but it was such warm weather and they had deteriorated the brine to the point that they all spoiled. So he thought that was kind of a waste so the next year he hired somebody to smoke. It was a real wound to his pride not to be able to do all these things because…he believed in being self-sufficient to the point where you could.”

Wells: “Someone told [my father] that Mr. Williamson staked a gold miner at Cripple Creek and he struck it rich, and so Mr. Williamson built the front part of this house. She told me that she was from the South, and so…he made it so that they could dance around and around, and I guess they could!

Dyni: "You mean they could dance from one room and make a big circle through the next room and all the way around?"

Wells: "One of my cousins used to walk out from Boulder…and she told me…I couldn’t believe it, that they would walk out, a bunch of young people, and they would dance here and then they’d go back in, walking in, and I said, ‘didn’t your mother worry about you?’ ‘No, she said, we were with a bunch of kids and we’d just walk back in!’ So I know they did."

Dyni: “But the walls here are solid brick, so there’s no insulation other than this real thick wall? Has that soft brick…”

Wells: “This is hard brick on the front part, but the back is soft.”

Dyni: ”Has that presented any structural problems for you?”

Anne: “Not so far; we’ve got to really shore up the plaster in the basement. It’s Butte rock and soft brick. Underneath it seems to be mostly Butte rock, underneath the floors, and then soft brick on the outside walls.”

Dyni: “From Valmont Butte over here?”

Wells: ”Um-hum, I’m sure, because it’s the same kind of stone.”

The property was purchased by the Department of Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP). The City of Boulder Open Space Board of Trustees recommended, and the Boulder City Council approved the acquisition because the property includes values and elements associated with nearly all open space purposes in the city charter. When OSMP acquired the property, it did not end day-to-day agricultural operations on the property because it would negatively impact the property’s agricultural and natural values. In 2018, OSMP started leasing the property for local agricultural operations; the Wells House was not included in the lease area and remains unoccupied and closed to the public.

A Historic Structures Assessment & Preservation Plan was completed in June 2019 to document the physical condition of the structure, identify problem areas and provide recommendations for repairs. As part of the assessment, floor plans of the existing house were created.

The assessment documents significant deficiencies and estimated $800,000 of work needed, including the following findings:

Roof: Wood shingled roofing was found in poor condition and replacement was recommended.
Basement: Foundation cracks were observed. Annual inspections and monitoring were recommended.
Framing: Water damage, rotting and fire damage was observed. Further assessment by a structural engineer was recommended.
Drainage: The gutter and downspout system was found to be incomplete and not functioning, causing water intrusion and damage to the interior. Repairs and additional gutters, downspouts and splash blocks were recommended.
Windows: Existing windows were generally rated as either fair or good condition, but significant repairs were recommended.
Mechanical: The existing boiler type furnace in the basement was not functional and a new furnace was recommended.
Electrical: The electrical system was considered to be in poor condition and significant replacement was recommended.
Plumbing: The house is on a well and septic system with both galvanized and copper piping in the house. There is no fire suppression system in the house. Recommendations include the replacement of galvanized piping to ensure lead is not mobilized.
Accessibility: The site is not accessible and there are no accessible facilities within the house.