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The Holly Berry building during the lively Cripple Creek Gold Rush years after 1891 housed, upstairs, the first Colorado City private lending library. A Lydia Woods donated the $500 to start it. It was right in the middle of Saloon Row. When the Carnegie library, now called the Old Colorado City Library was opened in 1906, the books were moved over there and the private library went out of existance.
But as the historical marker on the front of the building shows, this building was also the meeting place of the determined anti-liquor women of the WCTU - the Womens Christian Temperance Union - which, along with the churches lobbied against the sin and corruption that flourished on the South side of Colorado Avenue until finally the whole town of Colorado City voted dry in 1913.
The irony was that both the Library and WCTU meeting place organized by genteel women were right in the middle of the notorious South Side of Colorado Avenue, where 21 Saloons stood in a row, while none were on the North Side. The second floors were gambling dens, and Cucharras Street, one block further south, was the Red Light district. Colorado City was the only Colorado frontier gold rush frontier town where the middle of main street marked the battle lines between the Wets and the Dries, the Moral versus the Sinful, the Saloon Owners and the Ministers from Pikes Peak avenue., one block North. Where there was a Church on every corner.
After the building was renovated in the 1980s, it housed a very popular designer Floral store, a Puppet Theater, and is now a gift store - Holly Berry.
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