History

In late 1860, at the manly age of sixteen, Ezra Potts left his Shenandoah Valley family farm near Waynesboro and found work as a fireman on the Baltimore and Ohio railroad in western Virginia.  By May of 1861, with all of Virginia preparing for war, he was promoted to engineer. His early railroad career lasted until he put his mark on enlistment papers in Bedford County on May 16, 1862.

Seventeen-year-old Ezra Potts military career was short, a total of three weeks from the time he signed a piece of paper in Bedford County, Virginia until a .50 caliber ball tore a hole in his chest in the Battle of Harrisonburg on June 6, 1862.  He’d been assigned to Turner Ashby’s 58th Virginia Regiment, almost immediately, as a replacement for one of the thirty-nine men who had been killed on May 8 at McDowell.  His training had been succinct; a heavy sergeant had asked him if he knew how to shoot.  When Ezra nodded, the sergeant handed him a worn muzzle loader and said, “Shoot them that're in the blue jackets.”

As he recovered in a tent hospital east of Harrisonburg, he met Fedora Willis, a stunning beauty of sixteen whose family lived in a small cottage located at one of the many bends of the meandering Shenandoah river.  Even after the wound healed, Ezra suffered a hacking cough that would remain with him for the rest of his life.  In accordance with the traditions of the people in the valley and nearby Blue Ridge Mountains, he courted Fedora for a year before asking her father, Able, for her hand in marriage, and on the twenty-first day of September, 1863, they were married in a wedding party that lasted for three days.  Fearful that upon his recovery Ezra would be pressed back into service of the Southern Cause, he used the rattle in his chest to feign consumption, and they left for the west in the spring of 1864.

The wartime journey was both arduous and dangerous; Ezra and his young bride, now five months pregnant, finally arrived in Olathe, Kansas in late September of 1865.  With winter soon approaching, they thought to wait in Olathe until spring before continuing to California on the California-Oregon trail.  Although it had almost six months since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, tensions in the state of Kansas were still high.  Olathe, nearby Lawrence, and surrounding communities had suffered greatly in the last years of the war.  Dozens of Kansans had been slaughtered and their communities pillaged by Confederate guerillas under Quantrill and others in the last eighteen months of the war.

Their Virginia dialect raised a number of eyebrows and they left Olathe for Colorado just three days after they arrived. Their journey to the Colorado foothills took almost five weeks.

The winter snows stopped Ezra and Fedora's California journey in Golden City, the capital of the new Colorado Territory. A chance meeting with W.A.H. Loveland ended up in a job for Ezra as a right-of-way scout for the newly formed Colorado and Clear Creek Railroad. Within a few years, this meeting would make Ezra one of Colorado's early millionaires. Fedora delivered their first child, a son named Malachi in January of 1866. The baby succumbed to diphtheria before he was four weeks old. Over the next several months, Fedora grew increasingly despondent and Ezra feared for her safety. On April 11, 1866, while scouting rail rights-of-way between Golden City and Laramie, Wyoming, Ezra came across a large meadow between two rivers. The north west corner of the meadow was framed by a large L-shaped ridge. He returned with Fedora two days later, and she was uplifted by the tranquility of the meadow. Ezra christened the area Solace Creek and claimed 160 acres under the Homestead Act of 1862. He named the river to the west Little Solace, and the river to the east Big Solace.

In May of 1866, little Malachi's body was removed from the cemetery in Golden City and reinterred in newly consecrated ground on a small island in the center of Big Solace. While standing in the chill spring winds of Potts Island during the services for Malachi, Fedora heard an eerie wind through the trees on the western ridge. The sound reverberated from the rocks on the northern ridge and she said it must be the echo of spirits welcoming her infant home. After that day, the L-shaped ridge became Echo Ridge.

Over the next few years, and with the help of W.A.H. Loveland and the other owners of the Colorado and Clear Creek, Ezra Potts was able to acquire the entire six square miles of the meadow and ridge for less than a penny an acre.