Newspaper Art - Edwards Store, Edwards, Eagle County, Colorado By: Jean Winthers Edwards First Store Printed in Vail Daily, Mountain Homes Section, April 18, 1998 When it was built in the 1920s, the Edwards Store had a then- fashionable false front. Today that building still stands across Highway Six from the modern Edwards Village Center, most of whose buildings were designed with a false front to carry out the Western Victorian theme. The Village Center's red brick buildings and the old store with its green painted logs are entirely different in appearance and purpose, and the false fronts have changed in shape from a blocky rectangle to a graceful arc, but the false fronts somehow serve to connect the past and the present in Edwards. Back in the early days of the west, the false front was an effort by shopkeepers to make their usually one or two-story buildings appear more substantial and imposing. Sometimes the fake fronts even had windows. In any case it gave the shop owner a place to blazon the name of his business and advertise his wares. The Edwards Store was merely following the building style of the times, with its modest facade and its name across the front. Now the old log building, painted green at some point in its history, says Kemp & Co. Inc. across the its false front, named after its present owner, Jim Kemp. It has not been used as a store since 1975 when Kemp bought it. He lived in it for a time, and now uses it for storage for his pipe and fittings company. The front porch sags, and some of the logs are a bit weathered under the paint, but the old building is still serviceable. According to Bruce and Earl Eaton, life-long residents of the area, the store was built by their uncle, Cliff Thomas. The store was first located across the river by the railroad tracks, then when Highway Six went in, it was built where it stands today, next to the Gas House Restaurant. The Gas House was built years later, after Vail had started. Earl Eaton, who now lives in Eagle, said that his father, Carl, had a sawmill and furnished the logs for the store. The store had living quarters upstairs, and sold groceries and general household items. A dance hall was constructed down river from the store, but it only lasted a short time before it burned down. With some automobiles in the valley and Highway Six to drive them on, fuel was needed and a hand-operated gas pump was put in at the store. The customer would pump the amount of gas he wanted up into the glass tank, then it would run by gravity feed into the car tank. "We only had one kind of gas in those days," Earl Eaton said. Later on a hamburger stand was built to the east of the store. "It was called 'Awful Hamburgers' because the hamburgers were so awful," Earl Eaton recalled. When the Gas House Restaurant was opened, the hamburger stand was incorporated into the building, and it became the Gas House. The Eaton Brothers and Felix Reynolds, another Edwards pioneer, all remembered when the Edwards Store was a scene of a murder. Two brothers-in-law, Ben Kaltt and Bill Wellington, got into an argument at the store one spring day in 1954. "Bill said he was going to go home, get a gun and kill Ben, and he did," Bruce Eaton said. "Bill spent the rest of his life in prison." Reynolds remembered a kinder, gentler Wellington, one who had lent him a necktie with a diamond in it for his high school class picture. "When I took the tie back to him, he said to keep it because it was too hard to tie with that diamond in it," Reynolds said. The building has had numerous owners through the years. Still in use, but its days as a store long gone, it sits in the heart of modern Edwards, its false front linking it to its modern neighbor across the old Highway and to the sometimes turbulent past. =================================================== Contributed for use by the USGenWeb Archive Project (http://www.usgenweb.org) and by the COGenWeb Archive Project USGENWEB NOTICE: These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by other organization or persons. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material, must obtain the written consent of the contributor, or the legal representative of the submitter, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access.