Bill and Diana Sowers
, Lincoln County CoordinatorsTracee Hamilton, Lincoln County Coordinator
Lincoln Sentinel-Republican, March 10, 1949
Much of Lincoln county’s early-day history is being recalled this week as Calvin D. Skinner of Mancos, Colo., renews acquaintance with old friends and relatives in and near Beverly.
A resident of Colorado since 1901, Mr. Skinner left Lincoln county as a young man in 1891, going to Ponca City, Okla., to work for the railroad as depot agent and telegraph operator.
A son of Tom Skinner, one of the Colorado Boys who settled Colorado township shortly after the close of the Civil War, Calvin Skinner and his sister, the late Mrs. S.H. Morton of Beverly, were the first white twins ever born in Lincoln county. Also they were the first babies born in a house built above ground in the county. (The first white child was born in a dugout.) The Skinner home was a log cabin north of Beverly, the first log house constructed in the county. That was in 1870.
As a young man, Calvin Skinner decided to become a telegrapher and studied for a time in Salina, later going to Oakley where a telegraph school was maintained. His first position with the railroad was as station agent and telegraph operator at Beverly. Going to Oklahoma in 1891, Mr. Skinner followed railroading as his career until his retirement in 1941 after 50 years of service. In Colorado, where he settled in 1901, Mr. Skinner worked for the railroad at Boulder, Durango, Mancos and many other points. His last position was with the Denver and Rio Grande.
Retired by the railroad, Mr. Skinner, in company with his wife, now deceased, went to Illinois for a visit with a daughter and her family in 1941. While there he took a clerical job in a defense plant and for 18 months worked at Mendota, Ill., and later worked at Seneca, Ill.
Mr. Skinner’s twin sister, Mrs. Morton, died in 1944 and his wife passed away in 1946. Since that time, he has spent considerable time visiting his daughters and nine grandchildren. He was called to Kansas by the death of his brother-in-law, S.H. Morton, Feb. 19, and since that time has been visiting many old time [sentence stops] Among others he is visitng his nephew, Harry Skinner and family, the Webb Cullums, Milt Wertz and several families in the Beverly community, some of whom are desendants of the famed Colorado Boys.
Mr. Skinner as a boy saw Lincoln county a vast range of prairie still roamed by occasional bands of Indians, and with scarcely a sign of a settlement. Now after more than 50 years, he is visiting the scenes of his childhood to find towns and villages dotting the landscape, the barren prairies now an orderly series of cultivated fields.