06/24/2026
🏨 A Hotel, A Ranch, and a Community in Hard Times
During the Great Depression, many businesses struggled to survive. Some closed their doors for good.
The Cedaredge Hotel almost became one of them.
Jim McHugh's father had owned the hotel since 1906, but the McHugh family had never intended to operate it. Then, in October 1930, the hotel management left. Faced with the prospect of finding housing for the hotel's tenants—many of them single schoolteachers—Jim and Pearl McHugh made a difficult decision.
They stepped in.
While continuing to operate their ranch on upper Surface Creek, Jim commuted back and forth to care for livestock and irrigate fields. Pearl managed the hotel, prepared meals, and helped keep the doors open.
The hotel quickly became more than a place to sleep.
Tuesday night bridge parties became a local tradition. Clyde Brewer faithfully reported the high and low scores in the newspaper each week. Pearl cooked for community gatherings, volunteer firefighters, ditch company meetings, and local organizations.
The Depression brought foreclosures, bankruptcies, and uncertainty to the Forked Tongue Creek Valley. Yet through those difficult years, the Cedaredge Hotel remained a place where neighbors gathered, shared meals, and supported one another.
Jim and Pearl would leave the hotel more than once when new managers arrived, only to return when circumstances required it. Their son Jack was born during those years.
Looking back, it is easy to see the hotel as simply another building in town.
But during the darkest years of the Depression, it was also a home, a boarding house, a meeting hall, a dining room, and a lifeline for many members of the community.
Sometimes preserving a community means keeping the lights on, the meals hot, and the doors open.
📸 Cedaredge Hotel, Cedaredge, Colorado
