Twenty Years at the Creede Hotel
A couple of patterns have emerged over the decades that the Creede Hotel has been bought and sold. First: when it’s for sale, it is usually decrepit. Second: if you’re lucky, and if you decide to give your whole life to it while it’s in your hands, you might leave it a little better than you found it. That pattern is the exception rather than the rule, but happily it was the case when the hotel was in my family, starting in 1946.
The purchasing party were two women and two men: Lillian Hargraves, her sister Dixie, and Lillian’s sons Orin (OK) and Ed. Dixie (more about her below) supplied most of the cash. OK and Ed, both recently demobilized from the war in Europe, contributed some of their separation pay. Lillian had no money to contribute but she was to become the leading light of the hotel for the next twenty years.
How did these four, natives of the Texas and Lousiana bayou country, converge on a small Colorado mining town? There are three main threads in the backstory. First and foremost is Dixie, or officially, Angeline Munn. I’ve written about her adventurous life in greater detail here. Eight years older than Lillian, she had come to Colorado in the 1920s and married Arthur Munn. He was a shoe salesman. She became a prospector, an owner and operator of gold mines, a wealthy socialite in Denver, and a successful hotelier in her own right, all in the…
