Cora Oyler Smith lived in Fruita longer than anyone ever has. Boone tells the tale of her father's orchards, her sisters, and the house with the picture windows, in a valley the government had other plans for.
If you wanted a drink in old Fruita, the story goes, you found Tine Oyler, you paid the man, and then you stood real still. He'd walk off through the trees without a backward look, and a flask would slip down his pant leg and lie there in the dirt, an accident, you understand, between you and the ground. The park's historian wants it known that only a few in that valley ever made the stuff, and rarely, and Tine was one of its leading fruit growers. I only wanted you to have a laugh first. He and his wife Marie had three girls, and the nearest doctor was twenty-seven miles off at Loa. Clara died of typhoid at eight. Carrie died at eighteen when her appendix burst. Charles Kelly, the monument's first custodian, told it that a cowboy named Bob Johnson loved Carrie, and the two of them left their names on rocks all over this country, and that long afterward somebody freshened those names in secret, and nobody saw who. That's Kelly's story, and you may have it as he left it. So it came down to Cora, and nobody ever lived in Fruita longer. She married Merin Smith at nineteen, they bought ground from her father, and a good many of the trees on it she put in herself. When the monument came in nineteen thirty-seven she was one of the very few in the valley against it, because she could see what it would change. She had just built a new house, green trim and picture windows, when they decided Highway twenty-four would go across her land, the same road this whole tour hangs on. Most of her neighbors sold. Cora never even named a price. The government's last offer was thirteen thousand dollars for her thirty-five acres. In June of sixty-one it took them, and she went to court and won better than twenty-seven thousand, double the money, and the house was condemned anyway. Thirty-some years on she still thought the ones who sold were all nuts. "I wanted it like it was," she said. The park has kept one more line of hers. "I thought I would keep it like it was forever." The record never says what those windows looked out on. I'd guess rows of fruit trees she set herself, the evening coming on, and a woman on the inside of all that brand new glass.
Photo: NPS / Ralph Webb · Public domain (U.S. Government work)