HISTORY
OF THE INN
Little Red is located in the heart of downtown Aspen on Cooper Avenue, named after Captain Isaac Cooper, one of four companions of B. Clark Wheeler, for whom Aspen’s Wheeler Opera House is named. Wheeler led his group to Ute
City and formed the Aspen Town and Land Company. Wheeler’s group established legal rights to the town by virtue of a survey his group created in February 1880 at which time he changed the town’s name to Aspen. Three months later Wheeler’s group leveraged their right by laying the town’s first subdivision, including the famed Cooper Street location of Little Red. By promising to sell each lot occupied by squatters claiming the age-old custom of “squatters rights” for
10 dollars, and further promising to build roads and a smelter, Wheeler’s group overcame opposition. However, land claim disputes still trouble the
county’s courts.
Aspen is marked by two separate and distinct boom eras, the silver boom of the 1880s and the ski boom initiated in the
1950s. The Little Red Ski Haus’s logo reflects these booms, anchored to the left by two silver mining picks and to the right by a pair of skis. The peaceful mountain setting and its cultural roots established during the silver mining days likely kept Aspen alive during its
60 plus-year gap between its boom years known as "the quiet
years."
The
city’s peacefulness may be the spirit of Chief Ouray, known as a
"man of peace," at a time of war between the "Indians
and the Whites." Chief Ouray signed a treaty in 1879 with the
U.S. creating the impetus for Wheeler’s endeavors. Chief Ouray led
one of seven bands of the Ute Indians that occupied Ute City and the
Roaring Fork Valley. Ouray’s band was known as the Tabeguache or
Uncompahgre. The Ute Indians
www.southern-ute.nsn.us/history/index.html
are Colorado’s oldest, continuous residents, but gave up their
rights to the Valley with the signing of the 1879 treaty.
Little Red was built nine years after the treaty in 1888 by a silver miner, just eight years after the settlement of the town, during the height of the 1880s boom. The squatter’s debate created by Wheeler is apparent in Little Red’s first recorded deed. The land ownership deed was recorded in 1897, but acknowledges the creation of the “town site” in which Little Red sits in 1881, one year after Wheeler’s subdivision plat. The official seal of the United States of America is hand-scrolled on the deed signed “by the President Grover Cleveland, by J. A. Pugh, Acting Secretary.”
By 1885 Aspen exploded with more than 1000 homes; and by 1887 the town’s gates of isolation were removed when two competing railroads arrived, The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and the Colorado “Midland Railroad” Company. Little Red’s first
owner must have been a proud homeowner in a town that had an “air of respectability” with churches, schools, family housing, cultural events, businesses, and saloons. Five years after Little Red’s birth, however, the silver boom came to a screeching halt after President Cleveland repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in fear of undermining the nation’s gold reserves. Aspen collapsed by the turn of the century from more than
10,000 residents to less than 5,000.
Little Red changed ownership
several times during the quiet years and was then purchased by one of the Toni Twins, Marge Babcock, and her husband, Jim,
in 1961. In her youth, Marge and her sister, Norma, became one set of twins for the Toni Home Permanents' national advertising campaign “Which twin has the Toni?” The Babcocks gave the lodge its name because it was red and reminded Marge of the Little Red School House located in the Chicago area where she was from.
Marge recalls their first
guest “a cowboy who worked at the Red Onion stayed all winter, paying
50 cents a night.” The original house had only five rooms: a dining room, kitchen, and three bedrooms upstairs. Over the
years Jim Babcock added more than 20 rooms which, for the most part, were named after silver mines and ski runs. Walk through Aspen today and strike up a conversation with a local Aspenite and you will surely learn yet another tale from someone who stayed at Little Red’s nearly 40-year run since it opened in the 1960s, hosting visitors from around the world.
Due to health and other reasons, Marge closed the doors in 1999, but held out from the pressures to sell Little Red to be converted to a single-family home. After nearly a yearlong dialogue with the lodge’s new ownership, Marge sold the lodge in December 2001 with the stipulation that its doors must be kept open as a lodge and its history kept alive.
David Fiore, the lodge’s Principal Managing Partner, brought together the new
ownership group, consisting of family and friends, all who shared in the enthusiasm to keep the spirit of Little Red alive. Fiore and Partner Michael P. LeTourneau, a recipient of historic restoration awards, worked with their architect, interior decorator,
the Historic Preservation Commission, and the City of Aspen to restore the original historic character of the lodge.
Click here to learn more about our
alliance team. While restoring the lodge, careful attention was given to provide new amenities to bring the conveniences you would expect at a top-rate
property while maintaining the ambiance of yesteryear.
If you are interested to learn more about the history of Aspen and the lodge, please check out our
merchandise page for recommended readings. Purchase these books before your arrival to set the stage for your visit!
Aspen Colorado
