Her deep love of ranching is rooted in her family’s pioneer history. Her great-great-grandparents began ranching in the Ridgway and Colona area in 1879, where Harrington grew up. She is director of the Ouray County Historical Society and Museum, chairs the Ranching History of Ouray County committee at the Ridgway Public Library, and serves on the advisory committee for the Ouray County Ranch History Museum, which is in the planning stages. Harrington lives on Ralph and Ricky Lauren’s Double RL Ranch, where her husband, Tom Harrington, is the ranch manager.
How did you get so involved in this effort to preserve the Ridgway area’s ranching legacy? My husband volunteered me after we moved back here in 2003. I’ve always had a love of history and a love of ranching. And I really have a love for this area. My father, Tom Roy, leased land to run cattle on what is now the Last Dollar Ranch on Dallas Divide. That ranch holds part of my cherished childhood memories of alpine meadows that seemed to be a vast wilderness with grass so tall that I felt like I might get lost in the waves that rippled through it.
How have your efforts paid off so far? The Ridgway Library now has a ranching heritage section. We published “Ranching History of Ouray County, Vol. 1” in 2004 and will publish the second volume in the new year. These books are collections of interviews with family members and friends linked to historic ranches in the area, along with a collection of historic photographs. Some of the stories were written by the ranch families, including one by Lou Cherbeneau who is 98 and wrote about his grandmother and grandfather’s place, the Sherbino Ranch between Ridgway and Telluride.
“A Ranching Legacy,” by Rafael Routson, (shown below) was recently published by Double Shoe Publishing in Ouray. This strikingly beautiful coffee-table book showcases two San Juan Mountain ranches, the Last Dollar Ranch and the Centennial Ranch. This book reflects the ongoing changes in an area where the beauty of the surroundings continues to draw more people and significant increases in population threaten to change those same characteristics that were the enticement to settle here.
What else do you hope to accomplish? We are working on a permanent ranch history museum here. We’ve been collecting and storing things. We’ll eventually have a museum and maybe some historic outbuildings. We want to have demonstrations like cattle-roping and branding. We have a good momentum for this project. Some of the big ranches have been helping, and so have the hired hands on those ranches. High school kids have helped with the history projects. People from outside here who like this history have donated. We have a mix that is driven by a real love of community here that makes Ridgway the community it is. We want to keep ranching a viable industry here.
– Nancy Lofholm
