AURORA, Colo.—Preparing for the harvest has come a long way in the past 125 years.
Most modern suburbanites don’t have to worry about reaping grain, killing chickens or preserving food for the winter. Even so, most contemporary city dwellers still cling to some rites to prepare for the fall, rituals that mark the arrival of a new season.
“Some of us find the harvest in our own backyard, because we’re growing gardens and zucchinis are crawling out of the ground,” said Tudi Arnell, executive director at the Plains Conservation Center. “Some of us recognize the change of the season by the weather. School starts. We suburbanites might winterize the lawn, clean the gutters, put up the storm windows.”
During the Center’s Harvest at the Homestead on Sept. 24, Arnell and the rest of the crew at the 1,110-acre outdoor education facility made connections between those modern preparations and harvest rituals from 1887.
The center’s main facility includes sod homes, a 19th century schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, livestock pens and other authentic features from an 1887 homestead. Family-friendly activities hint at a much more arduous harvest process, an effort that was labor intensive and involved.
“Those same activities have been going on for as long as man has been around. They preserved food. The houses are made of sod, bricks of soil and prairie grasses. They’ll need to be chinked and plugged and made weather-tight,” Arnell said. “The crops were being harvested—the wheat and the corn. They might have started to smoke a pig so they’d have meat all winter.”
At the center’s one-room schoolhouse, homesteader Audie Brinkmeier showed off an American flag with 38 stars and detailed a different brand of in-class discipline.
“Teachers would not allow you to write left-handed,” he explained, adding that teachers would tie a student’s left hand behind their back to break them of the habit.
Those kind of historically accurate demonstrations have been mixed with a modern dynamic for the Harvest at the Homestead in recent years. Organizers have worked to balance 19th century authenticity with a more modern sense of fun, Arnell said. That’s meant contemporary music, games and activities such as the Zuke Shoot, which sees participants launching zucchini pieces at a target with a giant slingshot.
“For a while, it was strictly a historical interpretation,” Arnell said. “As we generated more momentum and, to be honest, a younger staff, a festival atmosphere was encouraged. We started contrasting what was going on in 1887,” she added. “We take people on a wagon ride out across the prairie so they can see it as it changes and gets ready for winter.”
That view of the prairie from the center has changed dramatically since it was set aside for education by the federal government in 1949, and even since it was sold to the city of Aurora in 1997. The site, managed by the center on a long-term lease from the city, now abuts tracts of housing on its west side. The Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site is a neighbor to the center on its east side.
But staff at the Center say the steady encroachment of civilization hasn’t scared away the wildlife that frequents the site, a menagerie that includes coyotes, raptors and pronghorns. What’s more, the center has worked to protect the land that’s remained undeveloped.
“We anticipated that. In the ’80s, we ended up selling 1,100 acres to the city as protected open space. We have another site 30 miles east of here that’s 9,000 acres,” she added, referring to the center’s West Bijou Creek site that hosts a herd of buffalo. “The native prairie ecosystem has been more resilient than any of us could have imagined. The natural systems are still intact,” she added.
It’s allowed the center to offer visitors firsthand views of native prairie wildlife and customs. For example, the center hosts a Full Moon Walk every month, a guided tour through the plains that allows hikers to look for coyotes, owls and other creatures in their natural habitats. Similarly, stargazing events give visitors a view of the night sky unspoiled by the light pollution of more densely populated parts of the city.
“Is it hard to get a sweeping vista of the prairies of yore when there’s an RV storage unit on the corner? Yes,” Arnell said. “But we still have herds of pronghorn, we still have coyotes, we still have birds of prey coming.”
