Eads – Hang a right at the spray-painted street sign, head up the dirt road past golden prairie grasses, stop at the only framed house and behold the savior of this languishing Eastern Plains town.
Maybe.
The welcome mat at Gary Aughenbaugh’s new home is scribbled in black chalk on cinder blocks. His wife, Barbara, wrote “welcome” a few weeks ago when she toured her husband’s work in this outpost 170 miles from Denver.
“She drew furniture on the floor,” Aughenbaugh, 66, says of his wife. “I think she was sending me a message.”
Two years ago, as a way to spur growth, a local economic development agency bought 800 acres of farmland south of town, plotted it, hooked up water and electricity and began selling 40 parcels last summer at greatly discounted rates, a lure akin to a modern-day Homestead Act.
A 40-acre plot in Kiowa Creek Estates sells for as little as a low-grade sport utility vehicle, which people here hope is enticing enough to drag the town from its decades-long malaise.
Just as the first generation to settle the Great Plains was drawn by cheap or free land, the folks in Eads hope to attract people by offering property that is both inexpensive and ready to develop.
Land sales and giveaways have been met with some early success in Kansas, where at least 17 towns are using them in some form, but they are new to Colorado. It is too early to tell if they are a long-term solution for the plains.
In Eads, the decision was a tough one for a town bound to its agriculture roots for generations. For some, converting farmland to attract outsiders was blasphemy.
“If you’re not growing, you’re dying, and we plan to grow,” says Marilyn Baxter, the Kiowa Creek project manager. “We’re not going to save the town overnight, but you have to start somewhere.”
While many of the youngest residents in plains towns are fleeing to Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo, Eads residents are portraying their 700-person community as an anti-metropolis, where children can safely ride a bike down the middle of the street, seniors can get help carrying groceries from the corner store, and the only thing stolen was second base during baseball season.
Four families so far – including the Aughenbaughs, a retired couple from Arizona – have bought into the idea and plan to live amid scrub brush and a few wild birds.
“Look at that,” Aughenbaugh says, looking out the front of his windowless house to the vast brown and green nothingness surrounding him. “Beautiful.”
Jobs, farms dwindling
Like nearly every community on Colorado’s plains, the 110-year-old town is dwindling, struggling against farm consolidation and fewer jobs. The high school football squad will drop from eight-man to six-man play this fall.
Shops on Maine Street, the town’s main drag, are in varying stages of disrepair: Roofs have caved in, windows are taped or broken.
On a recent weekday, fewer than two dozen vehicles are parked along the business district. Tractor-trailers on U.S. 287 whiz past a bronze statue of settler women in bonnets.
Less than a mile away, Aughenbaugh is surveying his ranch-style home atop the crest of a hill a few hundred yards from a cattail-dotted, spring-fed lake where cattle are drinking.
After months of searching for a small-town retirement community in Colorado last year, Aughenbaugh stumbled across Kiowa Creek properties. Within a few days, he and his wife were taking a tour with Baxter, who helped the couple find their plot.
For $18,000, they now own 12.6 acres on which they will complete their 2,200-square-foot home this fall.
The property is just close enough to the couple’s grown children in Denver, but “not so close that we’d be in each other’s hair,” Aughenbaugh says.
From his garage, Aughenbaugh can see the new Prairie Pines assisted- living center that opened last month, a railroad line that plans to reopen soon, and treetops near Maine Street, where high school students are raising money to refurbish a 59-year-old theater as part of an effort to turn neighboring buildings into a town cultural center.
The changes are an outcropping of a meeting six years ago in a back room at the Kountry Kitchen diner, where elected officials and volunteers debated the future of their town.
By that time, Eads had lost hundreds of residents, part of the withering economic life of America’s plains. There were genuine fears that, without action, their community could become a modern-day ghost town.
A decision was made.
“If we go down,” Councilman Dennis Pearson says, “we go down fighting.”
With mostly volunteers and grant money, they joined statewide organizations, touted bird-watching and hunting opportunities, promoted antique shops and an art gallery, linked residents to wireless Internet and opened a day care.
By the time the Kiowa Creek property was purchased, the town had lost another 45 people.
Selling towns creatively
But it is not all doom and gloom.
Stephan Weiler, an economist at the Center for the Study of Rural America at the Federal Reserve Bank, says population losses have forced communities into thinking creatively about how to sell their towns to vacationers, retirees and families with school-age children.
In addition to discount land sales, the plains are being touted as the new hub for e-commerce, where technology, low taxes and a willing workforce are readily available. And high school students are becoming versed in local politics with the idea that they someday could run their hometowns.
“Unlike big cities, where you need a company to move in to make a difference, you only need five, 10, 15 new jobs to make a small town thrive,” Weiler says. “If there’s some success in these places, they could be a model on how to develop a new identity on the plains.”
Which is how Aughenbaugh got here.
It’s stiflingly hot atop Horizon Way, the street where the house of 2-by-4s stands. A nearby windsock is in full salute.
There is a roof, a patio and a rough outline of rooms.
“I have a separate closet from my wife, thank goodness,” he says.
The house has taken almost six months to build, and there’s a guest list for Thanksgiving.
But here, with the sun directly overhead, there is no deadline pressure, just a proud, smiling man with sweat running down the sides of his wrinkled face.
“This,” Aughenbaugh says, “is my dream home.”
Denver Post researcher Barry Osborne contributed to this report.
