Fox Farms Around the Palmer Divide

Sunday, March 13, 2011
The Castle Rock News-Press
Danny Summers

North of Colorado Springs is a 100-square-mile community bordered by the Palmer Divide that is home to a distinctive oasis of Ponderosa Pine which has long attracted settlers to the area.

As early as the 1860s, “Piney,” as it was called then, was a haven for escapees from the Civil War who came west and worked in the sawmills that provided wood and railroad ties for the Kansas and Pacific railroads.

By the 1920s, bootleggers used thick pines to hide out. Finally, by the 1940s the area was descriptively renamed Black Forest. In 1986, El Paso County designated 410 acres of Black Forest as a park and named it Fox Run.

According to Tri-Lakes historian and author Lucille Lavelett in her book “Monument’s Faded Communities and its Folk Lore,” what is now known as the Black Forest Baptist Assembly was once one of the best and largest fox farms in the west. The climate was ideal to raise foxes that grew beautiful fur.

The farm was started in the 1930s by a Mr. Shelby. David Gibbs was the first manager. The farm had 12 modern homes where the year-round employees lived. During the pelting season the farm employed 22 extra employees for three months to get furs ready to ship to markets in the east.

The farm had eight units of fenced pens that housed 3,500 breeding foxes. In 1937 the farm shipped 200,000 furs to the eastern markets.

Food for the foxes was supplied by local ranchers, who butchered the cattle and froze the meat, which was later fed to the foxes.

In the 1930’s, fox hides were selling for a month’s wage of about $114. Farmers were desperate to get their hands on breeding stock as silver-fox pelts were being sold for up to $1,000. The average income was $1,368.

The fox fur business thrived, but in 1946 that all changed when the United States made a trade agreement with Russia. Simply, Russia traded their furs to the United States for a metal we had used to harden steel. Before long the fur market became flooded with Russian furs. All of the Black Forest fur farmers, as well as most others around the United States, were out of business.

Famous fur farmers flourished all over the Tri-Lakes area in the middle part of the 20th century. Jack Duckels, Colorado’s largest mink rancher during the height of the state’s fur industry in the 1960s, got his start in the Palmer Lake area. He first raised turkeys and foxes near Palmer Lake in the 1920s. Duckels eventually moved his operation to Aurora and added mink in 1933.

A Few Foxy Facts and Observations…
The fox is a member of the canine family and is known throughout the world in its wild state. Its size varies greatly depending on species.

Domestic fox farming was initiated in the 1880s by Sir Charles Dalton at Prince Edward Island, Canada, and utilizing captured “black” fox (a naturally occurring color phase of red fox). These animals were the ancestors of our present herds of farmed foxes.

Through countless generations of selective breeding for color, size, quality of fur, fecundity, docility, mothering ability, growth rate, and litter survival, the farm-raised fox has evolved to be very different from its wild counterpart. Good nutrition, veterinary care, and adequate, secure accommodation have resulted in a larger, more robust animal exhibiting a much quieter temperament.

In her book, “Rough Road in the Rockies” Hermina Gertrude Kilgore describes the ups and downs of log cabin life on a fox farm between the mid-1930s and the end of fox farming for the Kilgore family. The family’s common day existence was difficult at best. Still, the effort and belief in a better tomorrow kept them going through, some would say, “the toughest of times.”

At the end of World War I, in 1918, the Fashion Industry went mad over silver fox pelts which sold at fur auction for over $1,200 a skin. The story was just the opposite after World War II, as we were to learn from personal experience.

“In the fall of 1946 we had invested $1,700 hard earned dollars in used equipment. It was beyond our imagination that the fox fur market would go still lower in the ensuing months. Fashion is fickle and circumstances can change rapidly. Yearly non-farm income in 1946 averaged $3,000 with farm income only totaling about $1,200 per year.

At the end, a highest quality Silver-Fox pelt would average for twenty dollars apiece, less than the cost of raising the fox! The once valuable breeding stocks were pelted out with some foxes being released into the wild. The foxes we see today are possible descendants of these fur-farm fox-releases.