Businesses have a life and death
Just like Estes Park individuals, Estes Park businesses are born and die. Some live a long time. Some are still alive. Some last only a few months, or a few years. But to pretend otherwise, to be casual with assigning dates of operation, is lazy history. Take Copeland Lake Lodge, south of Estes Park on Highway 7, and closer to Allens Park. It was built in 1914, and when it sold in December 1938, it ceased to exist as Copeland Lake Lodge. The new owners renamed it Wild Basin Lodge, and started advertising it as "Wild Basin Lodge, formerly Copeland Lake Lodge" by the summer of 1939 (my guess is, it was primarily a summer operation, as so many smaller lodges were at the time, and some still are). Inertia is a real thing, and I'm sure there were some folks at the time who still accidentally and automatically referred to it as Copeland Lake Lodge well into the 1940s. I still hear media outlets refer to the microblogging app "X" as Twitter, despite the fact t...