Avon: Lettuce to Beaver Creek

Before Beaver Creek ski resort existed, the Eagle River Valley below it was ranch country. The Nottingham family acquired homestead after homestead as other settlers gave up on the altitude, and by the early nineteen twenties their ranch covered most of what is now Avon. The valley's surprise crop was head lettuce.

Refrigerated rail cars loaded with ice from the Minturn icehouse carried Nottingham lettuce to the East Coast weeks after harvests elsewhere had ended. That agricultural life ended in nineteen seventy-two when the family sold the ranch for development. Six years later, in nineteen seventy-eight, Avon incorporated as a town, and within a few years Beaver Creek resort rose on the land above it.