The Lincoln Hills story is an incredible piece of Colorado Black History. It’s surprisingly not well known. So, we wanted to get the word out.
Located along South Boulder Creek about ten miles due west of Eldorado Springs and an hour’s drive from downtown Denver, Lincoln Hills was established in the 1920s as one of a small handful of black resorts in the United States and the only one west of the Mississippi River. Easily accessible by car and train, the resort was a thriving vacation destination for four decades, until its main hotel and tavern, Winks Lodge, closed in 1965 and civil rights legislation opened new opportunities for black vacationers. Today descendants of original cabin owners continue to visit their properties at Lincoln Hills, and the area is also home to a private fly-fishing club and a nonprofit organization that provides outdoor experiences and education to veterans and youth.
The Great Migration of the 1910s–20s is often seen as a movement of African Americans from the South to the North, but it also resulted in the growth of black communities in the West, including Colorado. By the 1920s, Denver had a strong and vibrant black community centered on the Five Points neighborhood, which had several thousand black residents. Most worked as porters, waiters, barbers, and domestic servants (the main jobs open to them at the time), but the community also contained a growing business and professional class. Yet as it became larger and more prosperous, Denver’s black community faced increasing hostility in the form of racially restrictive housing covenants and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan that claimed 50,000 members across Colorado, including prominent local and state officials.
This combination of prosperity and animosity stimulated the development of Lincoln Hills, the only resort in the Rocky Mountains that catered specifically to African Americans. The goal was to give blacks in Denver and across the country a place where they could escape the daily burden of racism and build an alternative to the racially segregated resorts that were prevalent at the time.
In 1922 Lincoln Hills was established by two Denver businessmen, E. C. Regnier, and Roger E. Ewalt. Tradition maintains that the men were black, but records indicate that white men with those names lived in Colorado at the time. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that Regnier and Ewalt were black men whose skin was light enough to allow them to move back and forth across the color line when necessary. In any case, by 1925, they founded Lincoln Hills, Inc. and divided the area into roughly 1,700 narrow lots. Measuring 25 feet by 100 feet, the lots were advertised across the country to blacks interested in building summer cottages there. Lots were available for under $100 (with fairly easy financing: $5 down and $5 per month) and could be reserved by mail. By 1928, about 470 lots had been sold, half to people from Colorado and half to prospective vacationers or speculators from other parts of the country.
The Great Depression, which started in 1929 and deepened in the early 1930s, put a sudden end to many Lincoln Hills dreams. Some families could no longer keep up with the monthly payments, and those who could (or had already paid in full) did not have the extra money to build a summer cabin. As a result, only a few dozen private cabins were actually constructed.