Exploring the abandoned town of Keota, Colorado
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- Опубликовано: 14 окт 2024
- Keota, Colorado is a mostly abandoned town in the Pawnee National Grasslands in Colorado. There are a few structures left as well as many foundations and the old water tower.
I used to live in Keota
This is honesty the best video I have ever seen about abandoned towns. No yackty yack, descriptions only when absolutely needed. You have just earned another subscriber.
@@oregonwanderer Thank you very much! I appreciate it a lot. Thats the way I enjoy them as well.
I agree just slow down and show the places. No ransacking and no constant talking.
I remember being in the post office in about 1970 or so. My dad talked to Mr. Stanley for quite a bit.
Thanks for posting this, been up that way only a couple times in my days, some 10 and 30 years ago. So many sad and lonely reminders of the hard working folks of the past century scattered across the West...
I think my wife had an aunt in the green roofed house. She visited many years ago and they got some quilting information.
Use to go through here on way to see family in New Raymer. That was so long ago. It's sad to see she's empty little town now.
@@jaynorris3722 I wish I could have seen it forty years ago. From the pictures it looks like it was a great little town.
Not much left of Raymer either
Oh my goodness how much fun is this!
I drive right by that little town every year when I leave Cheyenne to go visit my family in Nebraska.
Lol small world °~•.☆.•~°
Lol thank you!
Good video and thank you for sharing!
I really like the music too!!!😊
@@jjdjj5392 Thanks! I appreciate it.
Excellent thank you. Subbed
Beautifully done! Thankyou.
Something very sad about whole towns being gone!
Yep we're going to be just like that someday too
It is so sad that people invested so much effort in something that just didn't hold meaning and life for the next generations for whatever reason. Considering how bad or how much farming and ranching has steadily changed in the last 75 or so years these places died along with that particular way of life....
I believe that there was a quilter that lived in the town up until 2010, more or less. I think she lived in the yellow house.
That's about the time when I last visited Keota, and there was still at least one home occupied at the time.
Obviously the prairie won, with an assist to the Great War, Spanish influenza, and wheat prices being set in Chicago. The town's apex is considered 1920 and went on a slow erode until 1999.
The very beautiful music is the perfect backdrop to this story. What is the music?
@@terrycolberg6543 thank you! I try to choose music that suits the feel of the place. I honestly cannot find the title but it was downloaded from a site called Audiio
Interesting and scary- decay / abandonment is scary. Music helps - light hearted and easy going.
Thanks! I try and pick something that's not too crazy and a bit relaxing.
It interesting to see things like this, but idiots who feel the need to spray paint everything need to have their fingers broken with a hammer. Probably a lot of those buildings were burnt down by punks. It would be nice if people could just observe the past without the need to tear everything up. The yellow house looks like it's still pretty solid.
@@ffjsb fuck you when your also trespassing anyone who goes there is trespassing so get off your high horse and it's not for sale retard I checked shows how much u know
I agree
@@ffjsb I agree but I don't think u would do any of that shit so ...
I agree. What is wrong with people who vandalize these old buildings?
@@YOUR-LOCAL13 Lack of parenting.
The track was abandoned in 1970 and then removed in 1982
James Mischner had a friend there and hung out
I was just there on fri i tried to sqaut there but they have a deer cam on the shed facing the yellow house
Go buy your own property.
Ask permission and odds are the owners wouldn't mind if you camped out for awhile. Just staying without permission is rude
Idc it's a ghost town and ima ghost I don't ask permission u fucking gatekeepers of nothing
@@jaynorris3722nah, the owners want everyone to just stay away from it. As evidenced by the boards over the doors and windows.
Go Away. Nobody needs to deal with that crap.
Interesting video however there is no context relating to what is being shown.
Look up the history of the place.
So many gone to rubble and then nothing......me? I prefer the rubble over steel & concrete....thx. ✌️
Y is the town abandoned?
@@sandramulholland9975 I’m not quite sure. I think it was one of those old prairie towns where everyone just moved away and the businesses went under, so the town followed.
No jobs. No hope of businesses coming and it's in the middle of no where, so long distant travel for work etc doesn't appeal to anyone.
There had been several unusally wet years and less than honest sales men led people to belive that it was good farm land when the rain stopped the families had to leave for better farmland or take jobs in the bigger towns. The town continued to survive as a water stop for steam locomotives until they became obsolete. Eastern Colorado has many abandoned towns all for the same reasons.
@@Coloradoghosts I visited Keota and did a little research on it a few years ago. I wrote a short piece that I tried to interest publications with as a freelance writer, to no avail. I'd like to include the piece here, if that's alright, for the benefit of your readers:
Keota
When most people think about Colorado ghost towns they likely envision abandoned mining camps in the mountains, and our state boasts some beauties. But not all ghost towns were mining towns. There was “Boom/Bust” on the prairie as well.
One such town is Keota in northern Weld County not far from the Wyoming border, in the middle of what is now the Pawnee National Grassland. The town started as a station stop for a railroad spur called the “Old Prairie Dog Express”, and quickly became a major cattle shipping hub for the area. Fortunes were made and lost with the unstable price of beef and devastating winters that could wipe out entire herds. But people kept coming.
Western expansion brought immigrants from Russia, Germany and Scandinavia to Keota who couldn’t speak English but were ready to stake their claim on the prairie. They were hardy folk who knew how to work the land and soon were breaking the soil for planting crops: pinto beans and potatoes at first but eventually winter wheat became the major crop. Steam engines replaced draft horses and gasoline engines replaced steam.
The town of Keota was at its peak in the years leading up to World War I. America was the bread basket for Europe and prices soared. Even the weather was generally favorable. The town swelled to nearly 150 people, but for every person living in town another ten was living on the surrounding homesteads. Keota remained the hub for it all, and it rose to the occasion. Aside from having a general store, telegraph station and post office, Keota boasted hotels and ice cream shops, a billiards hall, barber shop, doctor’s office, churches, a school, sports teams of all ages and a newspaper, with daily train stops connecting the town with the rest of the country. But the real connection was with the town itself.
Many homesteaders came out as extended families and set up their plots adjacent to each other, gaining strength in numbers for the hardships they knew could come. Goods were bartered and sold in town on Saturdays and it wasn’t uncommon for an event to keep folks around for a church social or school function. Keota even had a town band to offer music to the prairie wind. But soon this would all be gone.
Keota is a Choctaw word that means “the fire gone out” and refers to an entire village being destroyed by disease. With Keota it was a combination of things, including disease.
Shortly after World War I the price of wheat plummeted as Europe began to feed itself again. Farmers who had mortgaged themselves to buy new equipment for greater production could no longer produce enough to keep their farms. Not all the young men who left to fight the war returned, and many of them who did brought the Spanish Flu which further decimated the population. By the mid-1920s Keota was no longer a booming prairie town on a train stop to the West, but it maintained its strength of community. Then came the Dust Bowl and Depression.
Most families left, but others lingered on for another generation or so but there was no new boom to sustain them. The general store, where you could once buy a house package from the Sears Roebuck catalog and have it delivered by train from Chicago, soon withered from lack of trade and eventually became the post office. The school was torn down in the 50s and the families disappeared. The only spark left in the town occurred when James Michener was writing his epic historical novel Centennial and used the area as his base in the early 70s. In 1975 the railroad line was pulled up and the final death toll sounded for the town in 1990 when it lost its incorporated status. The fire had gone out on Keota.
Today, you can still see some of the original structures, including the general store that was once the center of the hub. The steps to the school are still there, but the building is gone. Foundations and old vehicles and equipment from better times are succumbing to grass, but the water tower still looms over town and bears its name with paint that someone has refreshed over the years. Outside of town the cemetery is still maintained by ancestors who now live in Greeley and elsewhere nearby. But you probably won’t see any ghosts.
There are newer houses and vehicles that belie the fact that people still live there, catering to the oil fields that are home to the latest economic cycle. The wind blows on and the grass has come back to its native form, tall and vibrant on the open prairie, washing like a sea. If you close your eyes and disregard the modern evidence you can imagine what it would have been like to have been on Roanoke Street in Keota in the late 1910s. Back when the fire was burning bright.
still private property. titles are still in effect