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 that Elon Musk changed the name almost two years ago. Here's the point: While there is always a delay in forgetting and discarding a long-established business name, with the transition from old name to new name being less-than-instantaneous, the opposite is never true. Nobody outside of the current owners and immediate family and friends is prescient enough to know when a business is going to die or change owners, and nobody in the press is ever going to start calling a business by its future name prior to knowing that future name. Wild Basin Lodge was born in December 1938 or at the latest by the summer of 1939 (or at the very latest officially when the business license was filed for, if one was required, or the old sign came down and the new one went up, as a practical matter). So if you see a photo-postcard of a building labeled "Wild Basin Lodge", and there is no snow on the ground, the earliest this postcard could have been sold is the summer of 1939. It probably wasn't produced this early, because getting out a postcard is hardly the first thing new owners of a business are concerned with, but it absolutely couldn't have been sold in the summer if 1937, or 1938. To think otherwise would be similar to you labeling your baby photos with dates prior to when you were born, and thinking this was somehow accurate, or this impossibility unimportant, or somehow cute. We have a lot of lazy historians in Estes Park, published historians who treat birth dates and death dates like squishy, stretchy marshmallows. Shame on them for muddling in Estes Park history, and shame on their supporters for thinking this is no big deal. It is a huge deal if you want to make sense of Estes Park history, and make sense of misdated photos that show up on the open market begging for accurate interpretations, rather than blind acceptance or wild guesses.