Cozens Ranch: The First Home in the Fraser Valley
Near Winter Park, Colorado
Long before anyone thought of the Fraser Valley as ski country, a family named Cozens made the first home here that European Americans would call permanent. William Cozens, a former sheriff of Gilpin County with a young wife named Mary York, arrived in the Fraser Valley in eighteen seventy-four and began building a ranch on land he claimed at the confluence of the Fraser River and St. Louis Creek.
What he built grew over the following years into a sizeable ranch. Because the valley straddled travel routes between the mining camps to the south and east and the wider mountain west, the Cozens ranch quickly became more than a farm. It served as a small hotel, a stagecoach stop, a dining room, and eventually a post office.
Between the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighty-one, a cluster of structures went up that sheltered travelers crossing the high country and provided the family a living. The nearest substantial town was days of travel away over rough mountain roads before any railroad pushed into this remote corner of Colorado. The ranch is now preserved as the Cozens Ranch Museum in the neighboring town of Fraser, operated by the Grand County Historical Association.
The original structures tell the story of isolation and resourcefulness that defined life in the Fraser Valley in its first generation of non-Indigenous settlement, a period when the high country still belonged essentially to whoever could endure it.
