8 JANUARY 8-14, 2026 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | As state historians considered Colorado’s next big event, its 150th anniversary this year, such a poor national assessment was not acceptable. Representatives from the State Historic Preservation offi ce made a site visit to the fort last March, and determined that the site is “fi xable.” “Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site is an important cultural and economic touch- stone in southeastern Colorado,” says Dawn DiPrince, History Colorado CEO, State His- toric Preservation Offi cer and a native of the area around the fort. “It is an essential historic site in the large American story.” And that story gets more complicated by the minute. What’s Old Is New Again The year after Bent’s Old Fort site became a National Historic Landmark, an East Coast family picked up and moved to Colorado so that the kids could grow up in the country. Their mother, Elizabeth “Bay” Arnold, was reading a book about Bent’s Fort at the time, saw a drawing of the original trading post and told her ad-man husband, Samuel, that they should “build an adobe castle like this,” recalls daughter Holly Arnold Kinney. The Arnolds found a beautiful property nestled in the red rocks of Morrison and bought it in 1961. They hired William Lumpkins, an adobe expert working in Santa Fe. Lumpkins pulled together a crew to create over 80,000 mud and straw bricks on-site, then turned them into a replica of Bent’s Old Fort, only slightly scaled down for size. It was an ambitious proj- ect — too ambitious. As Holly remembers, costs rose so high that the bank suggested the family put a business in the building they’d created as their home, to help cover costs. So Lumpkins rede- signed the lower level to hold a restaurant, and The Fort opened in February 1963. The menu was just as historically accurate as the structures. The Arnolds read those old dia- ries, too, and recreated the sort of foods earlier travelers might fi nd when they visited the trad- ing post, fare that combined Native American ingredients (Julia Child loved the buffalo bone marrow) and Mexican dishes, washed down with whiskey complete with gunpowder. As Samuel became more invested in his research, he lost a few letters in his fi rst name (shifting to Sam’l), wrote the cookbook Eating Up the Santa Fe Trail, then wrote more books and starred in TV shows about foods of the fron- tier. Walking through the Fort in old-timey gear, Sam’l would play the mandolin and issue his standard mountain man greeting: “Waugh!” The Fort soon be- came a must-stop for any visitor to Denver. But over time, this Fort, too, went through chal- lenges. At one point, the Arnolds sold it, but Sam’l took it back, with Holly in line to continue running it; she was be- coming a force in the state’s tourism industry, too. Meanwhile, the restaurant made its own history: Always popular with visiting celebri- ties, it served world leaders in Denver in 1997 for the Summit of the Eight (a helicopter pad remains as a souvenir of an event that attracted everyone from President Bill Clin- ton to Tony Blair to Boris Yeltsin). And in 2006, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. According to the National Park Service assessment, “This two-story Pueblo Revival building is exceptionally important at the state level of signifi cance for its rendition of traditional adobe construction and an architectural form that not only refl ects Colorado’s rich heritage but is built accord- ing to the original 19th century plans for the construction of Bent’s Fort…” By last year, Holly was ready to move on. On January 6, the Fort and the property around it will have new owners: Revesco Properties, which is Holding Down the Fort continued from page 7 Parts of Bent’s Old Fort are off limits to the public these days. The recreation of Bent’s Old Fort was fi nished in 1976. HISTORY COLORADO continued on page 10 The fl oor plan for the resurrected Bent’s Old Fort. NPS
