Barbara Lawlor, Gold Hill.   Last month, a contest sponsored by the Auraria Library of the University of Colorado Denver, asked that Colorado museums enter artifacts representing their individual towns’ histories. The artifacts poured in from all over the state and when the judging was complete, two Boulder County museums were among the top 10 most significant artifacts of 2015 winners.

Steve Demos, the founder of White Wave Inc., had donated his cast-iron cauldron in which he made tofu curds, to the Boulder History Museum and the museum entered the cauldron in the contest. Included in the entries are a Civil War flag carried by a Colorado regiment that fought against a Confederate incursion into New Mexico. Locally, the Gold Hill Museum sent in a display that featured the Blue Bird Ladies that found their way from Chicago to Boulder and Gold Hill when women were at the threshold of gaining independence as well as political voices.

Director of the museum artifact program, Dana Echohawk, says the purpose of the collection is to help museums preserve their artifacts and to help increase public awareness about the many artifacts that local museums have in their collections.

When Gold Hill Museum curator Joan Few and board member Rick Sinner learned of the contest, they went through their small museum and realized that the Women’s Bluebird Organization played a significant role in the history of Gold Hill as well as the women’s movement of the early 1900s that was taking place all over the country.

Few is a retired professor of archeology from the University of Houston and the Houston Museum of Natural History. The Bluebirds were comprised of working single women who originally met at banquets and teas in Chicago and then spread to the west, an annual migration. They began at the historic Bluebird Cottage near Chautauqua park where the women were known to have songfests, attaching their own words to well-known melodies. This Bluebird Song Book is included in the artifact collection at the Gold Hill Museum.

Jean Sherwood was the founder of the Bluebird organization. She and her colleagues formed the Holiday House Association which purchased several lots in Boulder and built the Bluebird Cottage in 1911. It was so popular, with working women of Chicago needing to escape hot summers and hard work, that they expanded to Gold Hill, where they purchased the old hotel and named it the Bluebird Lodge.

It was an historic time for women and the Bluebirds were influenced by the educational and recreational philosophies of the Chautauqua movement. The women joined in art, music and literature classes in Boiulder and then went hiking, horseback riding, and picnicking in the scenic mountains surrounding Gold Hill. The Bluebirds worked to preserve the town during the depression years, maintaining the historic structures and building new cottages, a dining hall and a church.

Even today, most of these historic buildings are still standing and being used, thanks to the foresight of these progressive women.

One of the artifacts is a pamphlet about helpful information for Bluebird Vacations in which the prices listed included a registration fee of $1; $2.25 room and board per day, $15 per week, and $55 per month. Taxi fare from Boulder to Gold Hill was 25 cents. Round trip train fares from Chicago to Boulder began at $27.

When the women returned to Chicago, they would meet at the Chicago Woman’s Club, a custom that had been honored for over 20 years. They would exchange memories of their time in Gold Hill.

A Blue Bird Club Bulletin relates: “Sweaters were tied about our waists for the sun had grown quite hot as it soared in the heavens and the large straw hats shaded our eyes from the glare. Each one carried an orange to serve as a drink while we rested on the rocks looking now toward the range and with a turn of the head out on the plains which seem to go on and on reaching nowhere.”

The Gold Hill Museum now has bulletin boards noting the Bluebirds progress in the small mountain mining town. In l920, Jean Sherwood purchased the Wentworth Hotel from Edwin and Annie Goudge for $350 and renamed it the Bluebird Lodge. In 1926, Tim Walter built the recreation and dining hall, now known as the Gold Hill Inn, for the Bluebirds. Walter’s relatives still live in Gold Hill.

Joan Few and the Gold Hill Museum board of directors are already going through the museum looking for significant artifacts to enter in next year’s contest.

Who knows what bit of history, saved for decades, could turn out to be a significant piece of a town’s history puzzle?