Seriously, it's an apple core. Gotcha...TURKEY bone...

It’s not like we don’t have any idea what Josephine Hupp and her sister-in-law Ellen Hupp were doing throughout the summer of 1906.  They had opened, according to the Loveland newspapers, a bakery in Estes Park, the location of which was destined to become the front door of the Hupp Hotel.  This bakery was in the east half of the simple one-story frame duplex John Cleave built on the southwest corner of Elkhorn and Moraine prior to 1901 (and perhaps as early as 1896 – the west half of this building served as the Estes Park post office), what had been operating as a grocery or general story run by E.M.A. Foot and business partner Jennie Chapin (who became the wife of Dr. Homer E. James in March 1905, after which the store was run by Miss Foot alone) until September 1905.

But the Hupp sisters-in-law didn’t own the property in the summer of 1906, at least not that portion of the property that would enable them to provide a much larger footprint for their much larger, two-story building.  This additional parcel of land (what was ultimately joined to downtown as the Hupp Addition and Resubdivision) was acquired from the Whitehead descendants in December of 1906 (or at least the deed finalizing the sale was dated and recorded in December 1906).

Generally, people don’t start building on land they don’t yet own.  There is the problem of the present owners not granting permission for such an endeavor, thus risking their wrath and potential police involvement/removal of building materials and structure partly erected upon discovery, plus the problem, even if owners were somehow stupid enough to be talked into providing permission because they were convinced the builders were serious about eventually acquiring the land, of the builders being scam artists or just losing their conviction or source of funds, and the project being abandoned halfway through and the intended purchasers skipping town, leaving the owners with an eyesore.  The Whitehead descendants lived out of town, but by all accounts (including the settled upon purchase price) they were not stupid, and certainly not gullible.

Again, there is no evidence for construction on the Hupp Hotel beginning prior to 1907, but let’s pretend for a second it did.  As a practical matter, when could Josephine and Ellen Hupp start building?  They are running a bakery in the summer resort town of Estes Park.  At what point in 1906 does it make sense for them to stop, just drop everything and embark on an unrelated building project?  June 1906?  That would seem to run counter to the prime business season in Estes Park, and counter to the Loveland newspapers reporting throughout June 1906 they were welcoming customers to their bakery.  July 1906?  Same problem, plus the inventory has now expanded to include ice cream and picnic provender.  August 1906?  Ditto, and receiving rave reviews.

Let’s pretend the Hupps put away the pastry cloths in September 1906 as the season came to a close, and drew up plans for a larger building.  Let’s pretend, even though the deed suggests otherwise, they started building on property they somehow had acquired prior to December 1906.  September, October, November, December.  That’s four months, max.  January, February, March, April, May.  That’s five months, minimum.

So even if construction started in 1906, the majority of construction (presuming construction was essentially continuous or at least in stages, which the choice of the verb “build” requires) would have taken place in 1907.  Oh, you say, but what if the building was completed in February 1907?  Then it would be perfectly acceptable to say the Hupp Hotel was built in 1906 (if we are using “built” in terms of a process rather than a completed task), because the majority of work would have been undertaken in 1906.  Great, except how do you explain the Loveland Reporter sharing the news of plasterers coming to work on the building in May 1907?  Is plastering part of building?

I hate the imprecision and ambiguity of the verb “build”.  In a general sense, I would prefer that historians who insist on using it in the past tense (and assigning an exact date to it) agree it refers to the completed task, rather than the process.  Realistically, this will never happen, because imprecision and vagueness is the first tool amateur historians revert to when the going gets tough and they run out of research time at the library.  In the specific sense of the Hupp Hotel, the Loveland newspapers initial report of a building in the process of construction that appears to match (it was unnamed at that point, as most businesses that aren’t yet businesses generally are, just a hotel whose estimated room count came close to the actual room count – it wasn’t like Estes Park was building hundreds of big hotels every year from 1900 on) was mid-January 1917, but I am a generous person, and freely admit that the blueprints may have been drawn up in the last quarter of 1906, or the first shovel of earth turned in late December 1906.

If it was critical for the author(s) of the "Pikas in the Park" brochure to keep the 1906 date in connection with the Hupp Hotel, if their reputations or future employment would suffer irreparable harm if 1906 was corrected to the actual “built” or “open” date of 1907, being a generous person, I would certainly allow them to say, in the absence of evidence, “Although we have yet to uncover any evidence for our beliefs, we feel quite strongly that groundbreaking for the Hupp Hotel could have taken place in late 1906.”  Such language might have the unintended consequence of creating a mini-controversy in the reader’s mind, raising questions of why it was so important for the author(s) to establish a potential groundbreaking precedent, as if a neighboring or competing Estes Park hotel were making a counterclaim, but their wording was inelegant to begin with.

Instead, the author(s), confronted with the assertion that, pretty much every way you slice it, the Hupp Hotel was built and opened in 1907, not 1906, “fixed” the problem on the “Pikas in the Park” brochure thusly:

(to be continued)