Moraine Park: A Lodge Remade by the New Deal

The building nestled here at the edge of Moraine Park has two distinct lives separated by the Great Depression, and understanding both tells a story about how the National Park Service transformed private tourism into public landscape.

In nineteen hundred and three, a woman named Imogene Green MacPherson homesteaded land in this meadow and began developing it as a private resort. She named it Hillcrest, then after her marriage she expanded it into a full-service lodge with guest cabins, a stable, a dining hall, and accommodations for the affluent tourists who were discovering the Colorado mountains by automobile in the early twentieth century. By the nineteen twenties, Moraine Park Lodge, as it was then known, was a thriving destination.

The National Park Service, always uncomfortable with substantial private commercial operations inside park boundaries, purchased the property in nineteen thirty-one and systematically demolished the surrounding cabins in the years that followed. What remained was the main assembly hall, a solidly built timber and stone structure overlooking the meadow.

Then the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived. The Corps was one of the most ambitious New Deal programs, putting unemployed young men to work across the country on public land improvements. In Rocky Mountain National Park alone, CCC crews built roads, trails, campgrounds, and facilities throughout the nineteen thirties. At Moraine Park they took on two projects. In nineteen thirty-four and thirty-five they renovated the old lodge assembly hall, converting it into a National Park Service museum. And beginning in nineteen thirty-five, they constructed a new outdoor amphitheater nearby, designed by the NPS Branch of Plans and Designs, where rangers could give evening programs under the stars.

The site is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places both for its association with early park tourism and for its Civilian Conservation Corps construction. The museum today serves as a discovery center focused on the ecology and geology of the mountain valley, and the amphitheater still hosts ranger programs on summer evenings, much as it did when CCC men built it nearly ninety years ago.