Our speakers will explore the challenges and triumphs of the people and communities of the Pikes Peak Region over the course of two program sessions.

Katherine Scott Sturdevant: “Sanitarium City” Meets COVID: Colorado Springs as a Crisis Community

One of Colorado Springs’s less attractive nicknames was “Sanitarium City,” because such institutions sprang up in it like wildflowers when people “chased the cure” for tuberculosis. Colorado Springs has faced its share of historic disease epidemics as well as natural and man-made disasters. The city’s familiarity with disease and focus on curing it might have sparked an extra degree of alertness, as well as attracting a substantial population of medical professionals and institutions. Indeed, in its Gazette newspaper, earlier Colorado Springs seems somewhat obsessed that every ailment of man or beast might become an “epidemic.” Preparedness also fosters a high level of “resilience,” resists defeat, and seeks restoration. Whether Colorado Springs’ responses are typical or unusual, they are patterned, interesting, and historical.

Pat Musick: The Depression and the New Deal: Regional Resilience and Restoration

New Deal programs aided the citizens of the Pikes Peak region in integrating qualities of resilience, resistance, and restoration during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The legacies of these programs still serve this region in the form of roads, parks, buildings, art, forests, and flood control. The response of the people to the devastation of the Depression can inspire 21st-century citizens.

John Putman: Colorado Springs Together (CST): Facilitating the Mountain Shadows Waldo Canyon Fire Recovery

This talk will revisit the story of the Waldo Canyon Wildfire recovery based on the speaker’s front line role in helping that recovery. It will explore the incredible resilience of the residents as well as the community synergy to maximize and facilitate as full as recovery as possible. With the increasing wildfires in the western United States, it is important to understand the important human endeavors to create good recovery outcomes. From all indications, the Waldo Canyon Wildfire recovery is a benchmark which very few communities achieve after such catastrophic losses.

William Schultz: God’s Country: How the “Foreclosure Capital of America” Became “Jesus Springs”

This talk explains how a real estate disaster transformed Colorado Springs into “Jesus Springs.” Cutbacks in military spending and the bursting of a real estate bubble shattered the city’s economy in the mid-1980s. The local business community sought to rebuild by courting evangelical ministries. Many of these ministries were swayed by the chamber of commerce’s promise of cheap property, low taxes, and a large low-wage labor pool. The result: dozens of Christian ministries, ranging from one-person operations to multi-million-dollar enterprises, moved to the city between 1985 and 1995.