HISTORY

The Florence Historical Archive is a product of the Carol Fox History Collection. Carol began collecting data locally in the mid 1960s and quickly became the go to person in southeastern Fremont County regarding questions on local and family history. Over five decades, Carol has fielded thousands of requests for information via telephone, letters, strangers on her doorstep and, recently, email.

In 2012 she began recruiting individuals to help do a simple inventory of the collection. Archivist Mildred Wintz morphed the project into creating an accession list to the collection, using standard archival methods, with the goal of creating a searchable database that will be compatible with those of the state and national archives. A team of four continued to work toward that end for four years.

In August of 2015, Carol Fox was inspired to have the collection moved into a publicly accessible space and made the team working with her materials the legal guardians of that collection. The city offered a space appropriate in size but needing extensive renovation. A lease was signed with the City in October of 2015 and the Florence Historical Archive was born.

For a more detailed history, check “How We Became the Florence Historical Archive”

OUR APPROACH

We are interested in working with all local history organizations. As a Colorado 501C3 educational organization, we will sponsor or co-sponsor, cooperate with, and support history related events of educational and historical organization in the region.

The Archive will accept collections from other entities on temporary or long-term basis and will provide other entities with or assist them in establishing an accession list of their historical data.

Our collection has been used by city planners, architects, attorneys, grant writers, history researchers, teachers, and college and public-school students. It has been a resource for local historians and published authors. It has been used as the source of information for several historic designation applications and grant applications. It was a research source for the speakers at the FCHS plaque ceremony last fall at the San Juan Bautista Cemetery and has been used as a resource for film, books, and articles.