Southern Colorado Research
Huerfano County - Cucharas/Cuchara Junction
Las Animas
County
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Updated: September 24, 2009
Cucharas and Cuchara Junction
The links on this webpage take you to my research articles about Cucharas, established in 1866, and Cuchara Junction, a railroad town of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Note: This Cucharas is not the Cuchara Camps established in 1906. Several family names are included in the articles.
To view the PDF files, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader.
In 1866, with Colorado still a territory, a group of Hispanic settlers christened their community "Las Cucharas" - Spanish for "spoons." This settlement in Huerfano County soon served as a relay stage station. Cucharas's settlers and first leading citizens-José Ramón Bustos, Miguel Antonio Vallejos, José Leonides Valdéz, Jesús María Manzanares, and others-were the descendents of families who had colonized the Spanish Province of New Mexico and settled the land as part of the 1843 Vigil-St. Vrain Mexican Land Grant.
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Cuchara Junction
Cuchara Junction was a railroad town of
the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. The junction was
located three miles from Cucharas. In 1924, the railroad
depot was torn down, and by 1937, rail service to Cuchara
Junction had stopped altogether. Residents periodically-or
permanently-left the area to work in the coal mines or at
the steel works in Pueblo. Today, only a few remnants of
Cuchara Junction lie scattered across a tiny farming and
stock-raising area in Huerfano County.
Cuchara Junction articles
