Snyder is not DEAD

We were driving up Colorado 71 this morning heading for the Pawnee Grasslands when our GPS showed us a tiny town we'd be passing by named SNYDER.  Mona's maiden name is Snyder, and we know alot of Snyder's back in PA so we slowed TOAD down as we got closer and turned in on 1st Street.

Our visit would turn out to turn our minds around after we got the full picture of Snyder, Colorado.

 First Street was macadamed, as were two or three other streets but most of the eight streets, each about 3 blocks long, as in most small Colorado prairie towns, were dirt. Tiny grit like stones, actually, over dirt.

There were a couple of dozen homes.  Most of them wood frame though several were mobile.  There had been a couple of stores. This one to the right may have been the largest at one time.  Its empty now.

 There was a church not far north of town but it had been closed years ago.

And while most of the farms and ranches along rte 71 looked good a couple near Snyder were deserted.


From what we saw of Snyder the town was on its last legs; nearly dead; only requiring a municipal coroner to pronounce the time.  But we were wrong.

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Snyder has an active farrier living and doing business in town.The Hastings family provide on site horse shoeing and other equine services to farms and ranches all over Morgan County.

Snyder has the Carmin Welding and Pipeline Company.  This entire area requires the services of this specialty.  Water for crops is almost all irrigated from wells drilled deep into the Ogallala aquifer below. And oil wells abound in several places around and out of the county.

Photo Courtesy of the Brush News-Tribune

We found a closed church, yes.  But in town, not on route 71, is the Snyder Bible Church. They were founded in the 1950's and they have a new big electric LED sign! And new pastors. Josh and Kathy Elliot, who live in Brush, pastor this church together. Today people come from over 50 miles to attend Snyder Bible Church.

So Snyder is dying?  Dead? Not hardly!

And on top of these discoveries...

Check out the productive farms, not just the deserted ones, around here!

Wheat, corn, and thousands of acres of sugar beets.


And of course, cattle.

 
 And the South Platte River itself.  Flowing as it has for thousands of years, it brings surface water from the Rockies to the plains. Annual flooding makes the Platte Valley rich in good soil, and the water and resultant plants and trees bring other animals of all kinds to feed and thrive.

 Like these little 'Flycatchers'. I walked out on the Snyder bridge over the South Platte and saw several, then several more, and before I knew it I was surrounded by hundreds, at least, of these little guys feasting not on me (see Hitchcock's 'THE BIRDS) but on insects living around the precious                                                                      water themselves.

 By the end of our visit to Snyder, Colorado, we had to take a different view of what we had initially seen.  Yes, there was poverty. Some of the homes were pretty rough, but the ones we saw which were lived in seemed to have solid roofs and running cars out front.

Yes, the stores were long deserted, but we've found that almost every small prairie town has lost it's retail business to the larger communities.  You can blame the Walmart's of the world if you want but I think the simple fact is that after World War 2, when many could finally afford to buy a first car, and drive farther to get what they wanted, they wanted more selection and the small town shops couldn't compete. The folk of Snyder drive south to Brush or southwest to Fort Morgan. And the church I mentioned above?  They operate food services and other care programs in the name of Jesus for all who can't drive.

God is good, and those who follow His precepts find good, especially when they aren't expecting it.

So we drove on, but not before TOAD caught me taking one more picture of the huge expanse of the Colorado prairie.  I held up the camera to avoid getting the barbed wire fence that borders pretty much every road on America's prairies.

Which brings to mind one final observation.  The Pawnee Grasslands are impressive. They are made up of two sections of thousands of acres of northeastern Colorado land that is being allowed to grow back the way it was before the white man arrived.  Someday it is hoped that buffalo will roam free once more on these plains. My photos were unsatisfactory so I give you a pic from the US Government.

But sadly, while the land bears the name of the once large Pawnee Indian Nation, those people's descendants now live in Oklahoma. Forcibly moved by US land grants to white settlers over 150 years ago.

I hear the Pawnee thrive now in  what initially was a poor and disease ridden land.  I pray they may do as well as the people who now inhabit their ancestral lands.

May God forgive the sins of our fathers, and keep us from following in those same bloody footprints.

-Pastor Ken