For 20th-century Jewish urban dwellers, the Catskills were a respite from crowded streets and hot weather. Going to the country, in the local parlance, was also an opportunity to recreate among one’s own. As Jews progressed and succeeded in society, once legendary but now almost entirely defunct resorts filled the landscape. Visitors socialized, worshipped and ate together, with swimming and other recreational activities filling their days.
Jews were not the only minority group who created an oasis. Just an hour away from Denver, black entrepreneurs did the same. In 1922, EC Regnier and Roger Ewalt purchased land in Gilpin County, selling lots to black people from Denver and around the country, on which they could build summer getaway cabins.
At the heart of this community, which existed from the 1920s to roughly the end of Jim Crow, was Winks Panorama Lodge, which last December was named a National Historic Landmark. Operated by Obrey “Winks” Hamlet and his wife Melba, the lodge, which included a lively tavern, hosted black luminaries of the day, from Langston Hughes to Duke Ellington.
“It was a fun, safe haven,” says Jeanette Patterson, executive director of Lincoln Hills Cares, the foundation that is preserving the site
The 1920s, she recalls, is when the Ku Klux Klan was at the height of its power in Denver. In fact the group burned a cross on the lawn of the Capitol Hill home at 13th and Logan of the Sayer family, who had sold the Lincoln Hills land to blacks. While there were no official Jim Crow laws on the books, housing discrimination was common, with certain neighborhoods, such as Crestmoor Park, covenanted to forbid black and Jewish homeowners.
So was social discrimination. At the Esquire Theater in Cheesman Park, for example, blacks were only permitted to sit in the balcony, recalls Denver native Judge Gary Jackson about his mother. By the time he came of age, he says, in the 1950s, that particular social more no longer existed, but the Green Book continued to be in use, pointing black travelers to safe Colorado locations. They included not only Winks Lodge but also a Five Points liquor store owned and operated by Jack Weinstock, a Denver Jewish WW II veteran.
Jackson’s maternal great-grandfather was one of the original owners of Lincoln Hills land.
Like many black Coloradans, William Pitts was originally from Missouri. He travelled to Colorado during the Great Migration, first to visit a son who was at the military Fitzsimons Hospital, but later to seek better opportunities. A carpenter who had the skills to design and build cabins, Pitts availed himself of the opportunity to become a landowner, and also helped promote Lincoln Hills to blacks across the country.
Most of the cabins were owned by Coloradans but rented to black people across the country who sought a safe summer vacation.
Churches were also at the center of promoting Lincoln Hills, says Patterson, part of their promotion of recreation generally, for their congregants. The local Shorter AME church, for example, was behind the creation of a Five Points branch of the national all-black Phyllis Wheatley branch of the YWCA. The church was one of the black churches that also wrote letters of encouragement to its members about Lincoln Hills and the girls camp housed there
Among the many parallels to the Jewish story, church life, says Patterson, was the “hub” of the black community.
As in the Jewish world, where a 2011 study by the Foundation for Jewish Camp found that “the bonding experience of camp not only builds a long-lasting taste and yearning for community,” Camp Nizhoni at Lincoln Hills, the summer camp of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, was an idyllic getaway, an oasis, for black girls to bond.
The sense of oasis also came from being in an environment where not only black people were safe, but also respected. Winks Hamlet, who had been living in Denver since the late 1800s, played a key community role in Gilpin County. Not only did he operate a hotel, he was a game warden, sheriff’s deputy and helped build the local fire station.
In a strange coincidence, Hamlet’s health started failing as Jim Crow was ending. The need for a black refuge was no longer needed as much as it once was. That combined with Hamlet no longer being able to operate the lodge to the same standard, marked its end.
The former campers who Patterson travels with back to Lincoln Hills are a testament to that.
Denverite Winifred “Winnie” Johnson, now in her 90s, recalls that on the “Dinky,” the train that departed Union Station for Lincoln Hills, “we could sit anywhere on the train.” Unlike in Denver and other cities from which the campers came, where one never knew when racism might be encountered, where one might be barred from any given location or seat, humiliated, Lincoln Hills was freedom.
“Nature is healing,” says Patterson. That approach informs her work with the foundation, which focuses in large part on young people, a natural fit for the retired public school teacher.
She was recruited to the foundation by its CEO Dr. Nathaniel Howard, also a public educator who cared deeply about environmental stewardship. The two planned to develop an environmental science curriculum for public schools. While that did not take off, acknowledges Patterson, it was the seed for much of the programming she does today. Her ultimate goal is to bring city kids, often from marginalized communities, to nature, to learn about the environment through such projects as a gardening program and, on the South Platte, water flow and conservation.
There’s also an equestrian program to help children who are processing trauma.
After Dr. Howard died in 2021, she became more formally engaged with Lincoln Hills, trying to continue his vision of introducing inner-city youth to the Rocky Mountains.
When you’re in nature, she says, “you can breathe,” both physically and metaphorically.
Camp Nizhoni provided that breath of fresh air for children who were barred from certain spaces. Estes Park was a so-called “sundown city,” where blacks were not welcome after dark. Like other forms of discrimination, it was not official, but it was the reality. So the black community started its own camp.
Jackson sees a resiliency parallel between the black and Jewish communities.
Many of Denver’s black residents came from Oklahoma, after the 1921 race riot in Tulsa that saw that city’s vibrant black commercial and social life brutally attacked by white supremacists.
Jackson marvels at the resilience of those who left Oklahoma to start afresh and rebuild in Denver. In fact Denver’s black community was, like Tulsa’s had been, vibrant, prosperous and educated, says Patterson. Most were middle class and employed, in a variety of professions from education to doctors and dentists. Many, including Jackson’s grandmother, were educated at HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities) in the early 20th century,
Denver’s black community had a higher reading level than New York City’s. The community created its own institutions, from cotillions to in 1921 a branch of Sigma Pi Phi (the Boulét), the oldest black professional fraternity.
Much of this was accomplished in the face of discrimination. Jackson’s grandmother, who held a college degree in education, worked as a salad lady at the VA hospital, not as a teacher, because schools would not hire a black teacher.
Jackson says that a few of the Boulét’s light-skinned members infiltrated the KKK and would report back on its meetings.
Capturing such stories is a goal of the foundation’s memory collection project, which it is pursuing in part with History Colorado, home to a display about Lincoln Hills that is currently being revamped, to collect and present more artifacts and stories, such as that of camper Winnie Johnson. “I want to get the story,” says Patterson.
It all fits in with Jackson’s hope for the restoration of Lincoln Hills and its story becoming more widely known. He sees a “full circle” in much of Lincoln Hills today, including the Winks Panorama Lodge, being owned by black billionaire Robert Smith and Matthew Burkett. Smith, an East High School alumnus is well known for his 2019 pledge to pay off the student loan debt of all of the members of Morehouse College’s graduating class.
Thus far, the Camp Nizhoni Administrative Building #1 has been restored, but the future for Winks Panorama Lodge is not yet specified, although a much-needed restoration is planned. The building is in disrepair, its current inhabitants members of the packrat genus. But its bones are in place. With imagination, one can see the lively dinners that took place in the main hall, where Melba Hamlet, by all accounts a fantastic cook, served up homestyle soul food favorites, like fried fish and rhubarb pie.
Afternoons, one may have taken in the Colorado sunshine on the lodge’s glass-enclosed deck, and people gathered in the evenings around the firepit to discuss anything and everything, from literature to politics.
Capturing that history could be part of a walking tour or a living museum, among the ideas that have been floated for the lodge. The latter could introduce young people to now-disappeared aspects of daily life, like an outhouse or clothesline.
Those external features are the only ones that Jackson interacted with at the lodge. Its tavern made it a strictly adults-only scene, he recalls. Still, children were afforded freedom at Lincoln Hills.
Jackson’s cabin is a mini museum of Lincoln Hills. His walls are filled with pictures from summers past as well as documents, including his great-great grandfather’s letter promoting the location. Atop the front door is the sign his father, a graphic artist, made for the Zephyr View cabin, named after the train that travels from Union Station to California and can be seen — and whose whistle can be heard — from the cabin’s front porch.
Smith’s isn’t the only “full circle” at Lincoln Hills. Jackson’s legal career path also resonates historically, from his grandmother who was forbidden from teaching white children to his stature as a judge who interprets the law.
The end of segregation was a pivotal progressive moment in US history, but, ironically, integration also led to the demise of much of the black cultural and social life the community was forced to create when it was barred from full participation in society. In baseball, the Negro leagues folded. In cities like Kansas City and Denver, whole commercial districts disappeared.
Again, parallels to Jewish life. What were once signature institutions in the Jewish community, such as, locally, Green Gables Country Club, became unsustainable in a society that evolved to afford Jews equal entry into once off-limits spaces.
Winnie Johnson, the former Nizhoni camper now in her 90s, reflected for Patterson that she had a stronger sense of community during her childhood years. Adversity has a way of binding people together.
Creating oases like Lincoln Hills “is a part of survival,” says Jackson. “Survival was key.”
Another parallel: Legacy.
As Jackson guides this writer through Lincoln Hills, he points to the cabins his ancestors built, cabins that far surpass their simple wooden structures, representing a community’s story of perseverance — and significance. Like the Temple Aaron historic designation, recognizing the importance of Lincoln Hills puts the story of black Coloradans in its rightful place, paying tribute to the impact that a small and marginalized community had on the state, and the country.
Jackson knows he stands on hallowed ground — and he’s excited to see where the National Historic Landmark designation will take Lincoln Hills.
For now, just as he has from boyhood, most weekends Jackson drives through windy Coal Creek Canyon to the cabin his great-grandfather, the son of slaves, built. From his porch, he sees the Zephyr train passing, on the same spur from which his mother disembarked every summer for her two weeks at Camp Nizhoni, when she was a little girl.
Full circle.
© IJN 2024