Mike Bowen

Co-author, We Found the Lost Sand Creek Site

The Blackwell Station was moved in the middle of the night and its new location became the town of Lamar.

A man named A. R. Black, a pioneer cattleman, owned land about three miles east of present day Lamar. His land was on either side of the railroad. His headquarters was located there, including a depot called the Blackwell station, named for Black and John A. McDowell, the foreman. McDowell and his family lived on the second floor of the depot.

The railroad had placed the depot there which included a stockyard for loading and unloading cattle.

Black was requested to have a Land Office which he refused. He was fearful of a loss of loading fees from cattle shippers—he was also requested to make some land available to sell for a townsite.

He had no interest in making land available or having a Land Office. The Santa Fe Railroad reportedly threatened to move the depot—he responded by threatening with an injunction.

The Santa Fe Railroad knew the financial existence of the railroad depended on income from new settlers and growing towns. Blackwell station was not sitting at a favorable location where there would be any growth.

A plan was put into place to move the station.

A Kansas businessman and a man with the Santa Fe Railroad bought a quarter of Section 31, Township 22, Range 46, in southeastern Colorado, about three miles west of Black’s headquarters.

The land was made available for a town site and plans were made to move Blackwell station.

For the plan to work, Black would need to be somewhere else, away from the depot.

On Saturday, May 22, 1886, Black received a telegram for an urgent business matter, and whatever the telegram stated, was enough to get him on a train headed to Pueblo. Once he was gone, the opportunity was there—the station was loaded up and moved three miles west.

As the story goes, when the depot was loaded up, McDowell and family were still inside on the second floor. The McDowell family had to be removed before the depot could be loaded and it was quite the struggle to get them out of the depot.

When Black came back from Pueblo on the train, the train stopped—he recognized the depot, but it was in an unfamiliar location. It had been moved three miles west.

Tracks were laid through the deeded property and the new town was named Lamar. Black didn’t want the depot moved as he considered it part of his property, but the Santa Fe Railroad reportedly disagreed with that belief—they believed it was their depot to move. It was moved in the middle of the night.

The town of Lamar is named after Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, who was Secretary of the Interior from 1885-1888 and a southern statesman (The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States by Henry Gannett, 1905). He promoted the growth of railroads across Kansas and into the Arkansas River Valley in Colorado.

It’s quite fitting that after the Blackwell station was moved, the town of Lamar was named after a man who promoted the growth of railroads.

It will likely go unanswered what was written on the telegram that urgently captured the attention of A. R. Black. Whatever was sent to him, provided the opportunity to not just move the depot, but start a new townsite, which would provide the finances needed for the station’s future. The train still runs through Lamar today with an Amtrak route and other trains that pass through.

Multiple towns have been named after Lamar.

Other towns named for Lamar are in Mississippi and Missouri. A county in Alabama is named for him and the Lamar River in Yellowstone National Park is named after him (The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States by Henry Gannett, 1905).

We’ve often heard the expression, “it’s a small world”—it’s common to be connected to people we’ve never met or from places we’ve never been. Lamar is buried in Oxford, MS, in the same cemetery as Chuck Bowen’s great-great-grandfather, William Bolivar Bowen. Their plots are about 200 yards apart.

Lamar served in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U. S. Senate, as a member of the President’s Cabinet, and as an Associate Justice on the U. S. Supreme Court. President Grover Cleveland nominated him for the Supreme Court in 1887 (https://www.fjc.gov/history/judges/lamar-lucius-quintus-cincinnatus). He joined the Confederate Army as a Lieutenant Colonel and helped draft the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession. He organized soldiers from Oxford, likely including William Bolivar Bowen.