Jackson Ranch
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
The land around you was once Jackson Ranch, and the story runs back to eighteen seventy-one. That year three men bought this parcel from the federal government as trustees for the Colorado Pinery and Land Company, an early logging outfit working the pine country south of here. One of them, Francis Jackson, became the company's president.
In eighteen eighty-eight the ranch passed to William Sharpless Jackson, a wealthy financier with railroad interests who made his home in nearby Colorado Springs. His wife was Helen Hunt Jackson, the celebrated author whose novel Ramona and exposé A Century of Dishonor pressed the nation to reckon with its treatment of Native Americans.
The Jackson family held this ground for decades before it changed hands in the nineteen hundreds. The community here still carries the family name.
