Calhan – A stone foundation surrounded by buffalo grass, sage and prickly pear is all that remains of the two-room house where Linda Hendrix’s dad lived with his six siblings and parents.
When she was growing up 50 years ago, the house was already a tumble of rough, red stone.
“I can show you exactly where my dad was born,” she told visitors last week, pointing to a patch of scrub hemmed in by the foundation of what was once a very crowded bedroom.
More than 100 years after her grandfather Mike Mikita Sr., an immigrant from Slovakia, laid the first stone for a home on this land outside Colorado Springs, the Mikita Family Ranch is one of 19 ranches and farms that will be designated a Colorado Centennial Farm on Friday at the Colorado State Fair in Pueblo.
Properties awarded the designation have been owned and operated by the same families for at least 100 years. Started in 1986, the program is sponsored by the Colorado Historical Society, the Colorado Department of Agriculture, the Colorado State Fair and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
“Businesses rarely pass beyond the third generation. When you start talking about 100 years, that is at least three generations or more. The family has probably made a lot of sacrifices – agriculture is not an easy road,” said Colorado agriculture commissioner John Stult.
Linda Hendrix’s mother, Margie, 84, lives on the ranch in a home that Mike Sr. built in 1915 to replace that first stone structure.
Linda and her husband, Ben, have a house down the road, and their son Bill also lives on the property with his wife, Colleen, and their 2-year-old, Trevor.
Keeping the 700-acre spread in the family has been no easy labor of love.
Through the years, Linda’s father, Mike Jr., and mother both supplemented their meager farming income with other jobs.
Linda and Ben, both 58, have done the same. Now retired, Linda was a rural mail carrier. She remembers rolling out of the post office with sacks of mail in blizzard conditions so severe that she knew it would be impossible to complete her route.
As futile as it was, she said, braving the storm was the only way to get paid. And the couple needed the check.
Ben still works for the El Paso County Soil Conservation District. With 100 head of cattle and some acres of hay and alfalfa, the work doesn’t stop.
While much of the land near their ranch was settled 100 years or more ago, few of the ranches belong to descendants of the original settlers, Ben said.
As farmers pass on, their land is frequently sold by children who don’t want to farm, said Dan Owens, a rural organizer at the Center for Rural Affairs, a nonprofit that provides loans and other assistance to rural communities.
Nationally, the number of farms and ranches has shrunk from 6.5 million in 1910 to 2.1 million in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. During the same period, the percentage of the population employed in agriculture has dropped from above 30 percent to less than 2 percent.
Over the years, smaller farms and ranches have consolidated, operators and laborers have left for jobs in the city, and suburbs have mushroomed, driving up prices for rural land. While agricultural land where the Hendrix ranch is located sells for $800 to $1,500 an acre, property abutting Colorado Springs’ eastern edge can bring $90,000 an acre, said Mark Lowderman, El Paso County assessor.
Though the Hendrix family doesn’t feel pressured by development, Linda has seen the community change over the years.
“I used to know everybody, but there’s so much subdivision now, you go to town and it is like we are the strangers,” she said.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it included an incorrectly labelled photograph of Mikita family ancestors.
