Agnes Ryan Singer owned an 840-acre Colorado ranch; her push to protect its fossil beds helped create a national monument

Few ranches can claim to have helped save a prehistoric lake bed, yet one in the Colorado mountains did exactly that. Over decades, Agnes Ryan Singer and her husband, Palmer, grew their property into a sprawling 840-acre working ranch and tourist attraction above one of the richest fossil beds anywhere in the world. After widowhood, she formally urged the federal government to protect the ancient treasures beneath her pastures, and once Congress agreed, she sold the land to the nation. This is the story of the ranch, the family behind it, and the woman who helped secure a national monument.How the Homestead Act carved a fossil valley into private claims before anyone knew what lay beneathJust south of the small town of Florissant, Colorado, a saucer-shaped valley about three miles across holds one of the richest fossil beds in the world. First discovered in 1871, the ancient lake bed was public domain land, which meant the Homestead Act of 1862 applied. The National Park Service explains in its history of the Singer family, researched and written by Lloyd Lacy with help from the family, that the land was surveyed in a checkerboard pattern and opened to claims before anyone grasped the geological value of the fossils. By 1905, thirty-three homesteads of 160 acres each stood on the valley floor. Settlers built homes and fences, ploughed fields and cut wagon roads through the beds, placing the valley in private hands and hindering federal protection for the next ninety years.How Palmer and Agnes Singer left Haswell for the Pikes Peak region and bought the fossil beds resortPalmer Singer was born in 1889 in Logan County, Nebraska, and moved as a teenager with his family to Haswell, a prairie town in southeastern Colorado. In 1915, he married a local teacher, Agnes Ryan. For six years the couple homesteaded near Haswell, where Palmer worked cattle and livestock while Agnes managed the homestead, taught school, wrote music and raised their children. In 1921 they sold their ranch and moved to the Pikes Peak region, a rapidly growing tourist destination. Six years later, they bought the Petrified Forest Hotel and Resort of Florissant, a tract once known as the Petrified Stump Ranch, with petrified tree stumps and acres of fossil shale. Guests could stay in one of eleven rooms, hike to the stumps or collect fossils in an on-site quarry.How the Singers expanded a petrified forest resort into the 840-acre Broncho Dude Ranch for touristsSensing a chance to profit from visitors' fascination with Colorado's cattle ranching heritage, the Singers added horses, stables, corrals and riding trails and promoted the property as the Broncho Dude Ranch, part science park for naturalists and students and part working horse ranch. The ranch closed temporarily during World War Two, when Palmer, in his fifties, worked as a custodian in Colorado Springs while three of his sons served. Even so, it kept growing: in 1943 the couple bought an adjoining ranch, whose pioneer log house became a bunkhouse, and later purchases brought the total to 840 acres, one of the largest working ranches on the fossil beds. After the war, it was renamed the Colorado Petrified Forest Ranch, and the Singers' children and grandchildren, trained as guides, led tours and served chuckwagon meals.Why widowed rancher Agnes Ryan Singer asked the government again in 1961 to preserve the fossil bedsIn 1954 Palmer died unexpectedly, leaving Agnes, an experienced businesswoman, to run the ranch alongside her grown children. Seven years later, in 1961, Agnes Ryan Singer, then 73 and widowed, asked the Department of the Interior to reconsider national monument status for the valley. According to the National Park Service, she owned the largest ranch in the central part of the fossil beds and, with Palmer, had already watched the federal government reject the idea twice since the couple began operating the ranch in 1927. She felt strongly that the time had finally come for the agency to grant federal protection to the Eocene epoch fossils. Some historians argue that, without her initiative and support, the monument visitors enjoy today would never have happened.How the legal battle ended with Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument and Agnes selling her ranchPressure to protect the valley grew in the early 1960s as environmental groups shifted their focus from air and water pollution to preserving the country's natural wonders. In 1962, a friendlier national park study, produced in part because of Agnes's earlier request, concluded that the area should become a national monument, which the agency called a huge victory for supporters. After years of debate and a lively legal battle, Congress established Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in 1969. Three years later Agnes sold the ranch to the Park Service, and the valley was whole again. She died in 1981 and was buried beside Palmer in Colorado Springs. The lodge and outbuildings were demolished in 1974, but in forty-five years of ownership the Singers kept the land intact and introduced thousands of families to the fossil beds.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.