Culver Family
Holding on long enough to let go
Roland Leland Culver learned early what it meant to lose land.
In 1912, Roland and his siblings inherited family land following the death of their mother, Elvina — the foundation of a ranching legacy their father Cary had spent a lifetime building on the Little Thompson River near Berthoud.
Over the next decade, Roland leveraged that inheritance repeatedly, borrowing against it to fund equipment, cover debts, and keep operations running. The Little Thompson land cycled in and out of deed of trust records as Roland searched for solid footing. He never quite found it there.
Roland and Trean Culver, early 1910’s
That search took him to Aspen, where things went badly from the beginning. The altitude broke his health. Five feet of snow buried a fine crop of potatoes and a surplus of hay that no one would buy. After about a year and a half, Roland walked away with almost nothing, the loans unpaid, the land gone, a young son watching the family pack up and leave.
But he kept the land near Horsetooth.
In 1918, Roland had purchased land on the south flanks of Horsetooth Mountain from Stephen Wathen, whose family had been ranching Spring Canyon since 1877. The Wathens were among the valley's earliest settlers, their stone ranch house a landmark in the Horsetooth community Roland was putting down roots in. Wathen trusted Roland enough to finance the purchase himself, holding the deed of trust until Roland paid it off in 1923. Roland used the land as summer pasture, driving cattle two days on foot from his farm near Berthoud twice a year.
A practical man might have called it stubbornness. Roland called it enough.
View from South Ridge Trail
With the Horsetooth land secured, the family settled into Masonville and built a life around it. Roland ran cattle on the mountain, camping for days at a stretch in a one-room shack on to manage his herd and fix fences. But as his health declined through the Depression years, it was his wife, Trean, who stepped into the work that would define the family's time on that land — and she did it entirely on her own terms.
Fort Collins Coloradoan, December 8, 1936
Trean Hartman Keller Culver raised turkeys. Thousands of them. She borrowed against them, mortgaging her flocks and equipment in her own name at a time when few women appeared on financial documents at all. A 1938 chattel mortgage shows Trean pledging 1,720 turkeys, feed equipment, roost wagons, brooder stoves, and her own 1938 Ford pickup as collateral. By 1948, she had scaled up to 3,000 day-old Bronze poults, securing a feed credit line of up to $15,000 from a Nebraska supplier and the Colorado Milling and Elevator Company. She ran that operation for twenty to thirty years, building it into the family's primary livelihood.
She drove the turkeys herself. Each season she hauled young birds by truck out to the dryland farms northwest of Loveland, then walked the flock on foot toward Johnstown and back, camping with the birds along the way, letting them graze grasshoppers off farmers' fields. It was labor-intensive, ingenious, and entirely hers.
Longmont Times-Call, August 31, 1939
The rattlesnakes were a separate problem. In three seasons of herding turkeys through the foothills west of Loveland, Trean killed 379 snakes, 107 of them rattlers. She had started with a hoe, but the hoe was heavy and interfered with her crocheting. So she switched to a cane hooked over her wrist. When the turkeys circled and sounded their alarm, she would walk over, kill the snake, collect the rattles, and return to her needlework.
Roland died in 1952. Trean outlived him by 35 years. In her later years she divided the roughly 850-acre Horsetooth holding among her three surviving children: Jack, Donald, and Audra.
Jack Cary Culver had grown up riding horseback up from the Big Thompson to watch motorcycle hill climbs on the mountain slopes. As a teenager, he had helped government surveyors carry instruments up to Horsetooth Rock. After the war, he built his own house on the family land, raised two sons, and worked thirty years as a lineman for the telephone company. He knew every spring, road, and fence line on that mountain.
When a stranger stopped at the property one day in the 1970s and asked if he could hike the land, Jack figured the owner probably didn't mind and waved him through. He thought nothing more of it until he learned many years later that the man had gone back to Colorado State University and, with another student, started a petition to purchase the mountain as county open space rather than let it be developed for housing. The sales tax measure passed in 1981. Horsetooth Mountain Park was established in 1982.
Jack had not planned any of that. But a small moment of generosity had pointed someone in the right direction.
Old Town Fort Collins, 1948. Pictured on the right is Beauty Haven where Audra worked.
In 1998, Roland and Trean’s daughter, Audra Culver Hughey, sold her 282-acre share of the family land to Larimer County. The $1,000,000 purchase was made possible through a $325,000 GOCO grant, a donation from Audra of a portion of the land's value, and Help Preserve Open Spaces sales tax dollars. The parcel became part of Horsetooth Mountain Open Space.
A trail connecting to Horsetooth Rock was named the Audra Culver Trail in her memory after she passed in 2006. Her obituary described the donation simply, “One of the greatest accomplishments of her life.”
Views from the Audra Culver trail. Photos by Brendan Bombaci.
Fort Collins Coloradoan, August 24, 2006
Donald Warden Culver, one of Roland and Trean's twin sons, spent his career working for the telephone company alongside his brother Jack — two sons of the same mountain, climbing the same poles.
When Donald passed away in 1997, his portion of the land passed to his wife Betty Jo Machmer Culver, a writer who contributed articles to Cappers Weekly and the Loveland Reporter-Herald. Their son Dale became trustee. In 2003, Dale sold the remaining 292 acres to Larimer County for $1,500,000. GOCO contributed $325,000, the City of Fort Collins added $200,000, and Help Preserve Open Spaces sales tax funded the balance. That land is now the Culver Open Space, protected and managed as a natural buffer alongside the open space.
The Culver family cared for this land for about 80 years.
They lost other things along the way: an Aspen farm to foreclosure, a father to illness, an infant daughter, a son and daughter-in-law in their 20s to a highway accident in Nevada.
But the mountain held.
Roland kept it when he had nothing else. Trean filled it with work and grit. Jack tended it and quietly helped save it. Donald held his piece until the end, passing it to his family with the same steady care he'd learned on that mountain. Audra gave it back to the public, and her name is still on the trail.
Four generations.
One mountain.
A gift made in pieces,
over time, until the land was whole again.
View from South Ridge Trail. Photo by Brendan Bombaci.
Sources:
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Quit Claim Deed, Culver et al. to Culver, Roland L., Instrument No. 145073, Book RE 285/361 (Jan. 11, 1912), recording.larimer.org
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Warranty Deed, Wathen, Stephen A. to Culver, Roland L., Instrument No. 187657, Book RE 367/456 (Mar. 22, 1918), recording.larimer.org
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Deed of Trust, Culver, Roland L. to Wathen, Stephen A., Instrument No. 187658, Book RE 340/310 (Mar. 22, 1918), recording.larimer.org
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Deed of Trust, Culver, Roland L. to Smith, Olwyn C. & Shoe, Anna M., Instrument No. 229163, Book RE 355/26 (Nov. 4, 1921), recording.larimer.org
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Quit Claim Deed, Carlock, J. L. & Lewis, Edwin to Culver, Roland L., Instrument No. 247786, Book RE 442/110 (Jan. 15, 1923), recording.larimer.org
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Release of Deed of Trust, Wathen, Stephen A. to Culver, Roland L., Instrument No. 262388, Book RE 484/23 (Dec. 12, 1923), recording.larimer.org
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Warranty Deed, Culver, Roland L. & Culver, Trean to The Colorado Motor Finance Company, Instrument No. 306049, Book RE 514/436 (Jan. 6, 1926), recording.larimer.org
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Deed of Trust, Culver, Roland L. & Culver, Trean H. to Denver Joint Stock Land Bank of Denver, Instrument No. 313640, Book RE 494/379 (Jul. 6, 1926), recording.larimer.org
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Deed of Trust, Culver, Roland L. to Keller, Allen, Instrument No. 335998, Book RE 477/193 (Feb. 14, 1928), recording.larimer.org
Fort Collins Coloradoan, Picture and article on turkey preparation including Trean Culver (Dec. 8, 1936)
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Chattel Mortgage, Culver, Trean to Pulliam, D. T., Instrument No. 464631, Book RE 688/502 (Jun. 9, 1938), recording.larimer.org
Fort Collins Coloradoan, "Death on Snakes" [Article on Trean Culver] (Aug. 29, 1939)
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Chattel Mortgage, Culver, Trean to C. A. Swanson & Sons, Inc. & The Colorado Milling & Elevator Company, Instrument No. 599762, Book RE 855/54 (Jun. 14, 1948), recording.larimer.org
Fort Collins Coloradoan, "Attention Turkey Hunters" (Sep. 29, 1949)
Fort Collins Coloradoan, "Roland L. Culver Succumbs at 75" (Nov. 23, 1952)
Fort Collins Coloradoan, Realty Transfers (Jun. 1, 1953)
Fort Collins Coloradoan, "Miss Culver Bride of Donald Hughey" (Aug. 23, 1954)
Larimer County Clerk and Recorder, Warranty Deeds, Culver family land transfers, Instrument Nos. 974859–974862, Book RE 1424/665–668 (Jan. 2, 1970), recording.larimer.org
Fort Collins Coloradoan, "Ownership of Horsetooth Rock Questioned" (Apr. 23, 1973)
Larimer County Independent, Death of Cary Culver (Aug. 14, 1907)
Larimer County Independent, Water rights adjudication involving Culver family (Jul. 19, 1912)
Hughey Property Resource Management Plan, Larimer County Parks and Open Lands Department (1998)
John & Grace Culver Interview, conducted by Deni LaRue, Larimer County Department of Natural Resources Archives (Aug. 10, 2000)
Culver Open Space Resource Management Plan, Larimer County Parks and Open Lands Department (2004)
Horsetooth Mountain Park Resource Conservation and Visitor Experience Management Plan, Larimer County Parks and Open Lands (2006)
Fort Collins Coloradoan, Audra L. Hughey Obituary (Aug. 24, 2006)
Roland Leland Culver [Genealogical record], Ancestry.com (n.d.)
Additional historical newspapers from the Fort Collins Coloradoan and other regional sources provided supporting details on events, land transactions, family history, and social history spanning the 19th and 20th centuries.