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Margaret Rawson Pitney
September 22, 1914 - September 10, 2011
When Lake City native Margaret Rawson Pitney was occasionally chronicled in these columns, most memorably it was as a revered matriarch surrounded by an expansive family which, in addition to her children and grandchildren, grew to include 15 great grandchildren.
A wry observer of the Lake City scene since her birth here and adolescence, Margaret retained uniquely close ties with her hometown throughout nine decades and was a fixture at her Gunnison Avenue childhood home every summer since retirement in the early 1970s.
In more recent years, her eyes would twinkle as she thought back over her decades in Lake City while gently caressing the pendants of a necklace emblematic of each great grandchild. Touching those pendants, she would smile at the confirmation that, yes, her pioneer Rawson family was continuing -- and expanding -- into the foreseeable future in Lake City.
It was fitting that Margaret was surrounded by her family when she died at an assisted living facility in Montrose, Colorado, at
3:30 a.m. last Saturday, September 10, 2011. Close at hand at her death, and just shy of her 97th birthday later this month, were Margaret’s daughter, Elaine Campbell Trujillo, sons Norman Campbell and Don Campbell, and sister, Celia Rawson Swank.
A memorial service with Rev. Rick Underwood officiating will be held at Community Presbyterian Church in Lake City starting 3 p.m. on Saturday, September 24. Her ashes will be interred near the graves of her parents in Lake City’s IOOF Cemetery.
As a continuation of her local legacy, family members suggest donations in her memory to Alpine Hospice in Montrose, Hinsdale County Historical Society or charity of choice.
William O. “Billy” Rawson and his wife, Mabel Downing Rawson, honored a close family friend from their days at Capitol City on upper Henson Creek when they named their first daughter. At her birth September 22, 1914, at the family’s Gunnison Avenue house in Lake City, Margaret Lucille Rawson, was named for Margaret Witherite.
Mrs. Witherite was a store owner and postmaster at Capitol City who warmly welcomed Margaret’s mother, Mabel Rawson, when she first moved here from Kansas City by way of Denver in 1907.
Margaret’s father, Billy Rawson, first glimpsed Lake City and its surrounding mining regions during summers in 1904 and 1905 as an employee of the John Taylor department store in Kansas City. Brothers William Taylor and John Taylor, owners of the immense dry goods store, also owned a scattering of mines throughout the west, including the high altitude Crown Point and Joaquin located above timberline in Schaffer Basin above Rose’s Cabin.
Described as a “steady, industrious, all-round gentleman,”
Billy Rawson left his work at the St.
continued page 6
Jacobs Mine at Carson in December, 1905, for his wedding in Kansas City to a fellow Taylor Dept. Store worker, Mabel B. Downing.
Following their wedding, and after a brief stint living in Denver, Billy, Mabel and their infant son, Downing, moved to Lake City full- time in 1907.
For the next seven years, the young family divided their time between Lake City in the winter and summers when they would move up to Capitol City in order to be closer to the Schaffer Basin mining claims.
The family’s Lake City headquarters after 1910 was the former W.H. Ogle residence, 216 Gunnison Avenue, where Margaret was born in 1914. In addition to Margaret, others in the family included a younger sister, Celia May, and five brothers, Norman, John, and Leslie, who died in childhood, and two older brothers, Downing and Hufty.
In later years, Margaret looked back with fondness on a Lake City childhood which included the requisite swimming hole at Crooke’s Falls, assisting her mother with cooking and household chores, candy- making and berry-picking outings, dances at the Armory, and impromptu gatherings with friends at Lake City Post Office in a portion of what is now Miners & Merchants Bank.
In an interview conducted by Bob Lozano for Hinsdale County Museum in 2004, Margaret recalled that the post office was “our chief gathering place... we didn’t have a mall, we didn’t have stores where we could hang out.”
When the milling adolescents became too boisterous, the postmaster, Clarence Wright, would emerge with a stern warning. “If you don’t quiet down, I’m going to put you out and shut the door!”
“So that quieted us down,” Margaret recalled.
In her 2004 interview with Lozano, Margaret also reluctantly shared a misadventure one Easter Sunday as an adolescent when she and schoolmates Edith Heath, Johnny McCloughan, William Wright, and Walter Andrik appropriated a handcar and went for a leisurely ride on the Denver & Rio Grande train track north of Lake City.
“It started moving along at a good pace and I started getting pretty worried, but good old Walter Andrik jumped off and stopped it before we ran into the river.”
Especially memorable for Margaret was a 1927 Denver POST essay contest in which the Denver newspaper sought 200-word entries describing the glories of Colorado’s State Flower, the Columbine.
Margaret entered her essay, had it proofed by teacher Lucy Beam and was gratified a few weeks later when word was received that she and three other Colorado high school and grammar-age students had been selected as winners.
The prize was a trip aboard Union Pacific’s new “Columbine Flyer” to Chicago. With trepidation, the 12-year old Lake City native set off solo from the Lake City train depot in June, 1927, amid the well wishes of a crowd of enthusiastic students and friends.
After changing trains successively at Sapinero and Salida, Margaret arrived at Denver’s Union Station, the POST chronicling her
arrival: “A timid-appearing, blue-eyed girl, lugging a heavy suitcase, bumped, nudged, and elbowed her way through a jostling, milling crowd of early morning travelers in the subway of the Denver Union Station Saturday and looked upon a new world with startled eyes.”
Margaret toured Denver and from there joined other essay contest winners on the “Columbine” for two busy days seeing the sights in Chicago.
Margaret cited Nathan Knowlton, Lucy Beam, and Prof. H.G. Heath as her most memorable and beneficial instructors during her school years in Lake City. She graduated from Lake City High School in 1932 with fellow classmates Edith Heath, Jean McCloughan, and Purvis Vickers.
Margaret’s father, Billy Rawson, was among the local fatalities of the influenza epidemic in February, 1921, after which Mrs. Rawson persevered as a single mother raising her young family, aided by her father, Thomas D. Downing, and her older children. As a young widow, Mabel Rawson took in sewing, raised potatoes, and sold doughnuts at Lake City baseball games.
As the family’s main bread winner, her economic prospects brightened starting in 1921 when she began the first of three successive terms as Hinsdale County Superintendent of Schools, and
1928 with the start of a 26-year career as Hinsdale County Clerk & Recorder.
Mrs. Rawson saw to it that each of her children graduated from high school in Lake City and enrolled in college-level classes, including daughter Margaret to whom she gently suggested the benefits and satisfaction of a career as a registered nurse.
Immediately after graduating from high school, Margaret moved to Denver where she enrolled in a 36-month course at Colorado Training School for Nurses. The school was affiliated with Denver General Hospital and after graduation from the training school in April, 1935, she began work at the downtown hospital starting in October, 1935, as a general duty nurse.
She took a brief intermission from nursing in the late 1930s for marriage and the start of her own family. During a portion of that time, 1936-37, the family lived in Lake City. By that date Dr. B.F.
Cummings had relocated to Gunnison and medical care in the town and region fell to registered nurses, among them Margaret and fellow local RN Katherine Baker. During Margaret’s short tenure as nurse here, she presided at the birth of two baby girls, as well as sewing up the occasional gash caused by a dog bite or other misadventure.
“I didn’t have anything to sew with,” she recalled, “I did have a needle and some suture material, so I kept those sterilized as much as possible. For delivery linens, I washed and ironed old sheets, then wrapped them in a package which I then baked in the kitchen oven without burning them.”
Margaret and family returned to Denver in the late 1930s and she resumed her nursing career at Denver General Hospital --- successively as head nurse, then continued page 7 night supervisor, and finally nursing supervisor -- until retirement October 1, 1973.
“During the war, I worked in the operating room at night,” she recalled of her nursing days in Denver. “Everything that was used on the wards came back used to the operating room where we had to clean the instruments, clean the IV tubing, rubber gloves, everything that was used for the patients came back to the operating room.”
Margaret recalled that the nurses’ cleaning duties included washing rubber gloves inside and out, cleaning IV tubing, and cleansing needles in a steam autoclave. Other more delicate medical instruments were hand sanitized using a solution of potassium.
Margaret kept in close contact with her colleagues from Denver General Hospital and just last year, as the hospital’s successor, Denver Health, marked the 150th anniversary of the hospital’s founding, was asked to reminisce about her early nursing career at a gala reception.
Margaret’s first husband was Malcolm “Joe” Campbell, a native of Scotland whose horticultural background included an uncle’s sugar beet farm near Las Animas in eastern Colorado. Mr.
Campbell worked briefly at the New Golconda Mine on upper Henson Creek and it was during that summer in 1935, following Margaret’s graduation from nursing school, that he and Margaret met during an informal dance which was held in the parlor of the Occidental Hotel in Lake City.
The couple dated after their return to Denver and married June 27, 1936, at the home of Margaret’s childhood friend, Bill Heath, in Pueblo, Colorado. Joe Campbell was a florist gardener and for years tended to the elaborate flower gardens at the old Elitch Gardens amusement park in Denver.
Joe and Margaret were the parents of four children, daughters Elaine Margaret Campbell, who was born in 1937, and Mary Joan Campbell, born 1940, and sons Norman Malcolm Campbell and Donald Wayne Campbell, born respectively 1943 and 1945.
Mr. Campbell died in Denver April 9, 1964.
Margaret’s second husband was an old friend with Lake City connections, William James Pitney, whose father, William Richmond Pitney, was Denver & Rio Grande Railroad station agent in Lake City in the early and mid-1910s.
Margaret and Jim married in Denver on April 14, 1973. With their headquarters on Perry Street in Denver, the couple travelled extensively, including spending a majority of each summer in Lake City.
Mr. Pitney died November 13, 1982.
Margaret continued to live in her old family home on Gunnison Avenue on a seasonal basis, christening the home “Columbine Retreat” and in 1988 commissioned Henry Woods of Native Sun Construction to put a foundation under the house and construct a sizeable rear addition.
During summers in Lake City, Margaret delighted in visits from old friends and regularly attended special events and performances sponsored by Lake City Arts and other organizations. She was a long- time member of Hinsdale County Historical Society, contributing numerous artifacts to Hinsdale County Museum through the years, and starting in 2004 assisted seasonal resident Bob Lozano on a research project documenting the grade of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad as it passed up the Lake Valley from Sapinero to Lake City.
Lozano says he was “energized” by Margaret’s enthusiasm for the project, including a day-long summer outing in 2005 when Margaret
-- then just shy of her 91st birthday -- walked with Lozano retracing a two-mile section of the old railroad route.
Encouraged by Lozano, Margaret completed text and illustrations for a 16-page booklet on her personal memories of the Lake City branch of the D & RG entitled “My Lake City Railroad Memories”
which was published in 2006.
As a widow, Margaret continued spending large portions of each summer at her family home. She suffered a health setback in June, 2010, with a stroke shortly after arriving in Lake City and was hospitalized in Montrose. Following physical rehabilitation, she relocated to Montrose on a full-time basis as a resident of Sunrise Assisted Living Center.
As her health gradually deteriorated this past spring and summer, Margaret remained at the facility under the care of Alpine Hospice.
Her last trip to Lake City came earlier this summer during a week- long visit over the July 4 holiday during which she was characteristically surrounded by old friends and family members.
‘ Margaret Rawson Pitney is survived by her sister, Lake City
resident Celia May Rawson Swank, and three children: Elaine Campbell Trujillo, Montrose; Norman Malcolm Campbell, Kentwood, Michigan; and Donald Wayne Campbell, Lake City.
She is additionally survived by nine grandchildren, Mark Campbell, Denver; Jeff Campbell, Chicago, Illinois; Scott Campbell, Lake City; Sean Campbell, Waterford, Michigan; Lori Haughey, Chicago; Lisa Arnold, Chicago; Richard “Chip” Arnold, Chicago; Mike Trujillo, Montrose; and Julie Trujillo Thomas, Denver.
Additional survivors are 15 great grandchildren. Margaret is also survived by three step-sons, Richard Pitney, Gerald Pitney, and Alan Pitney, as well as numerous nieces and nephews.
In addition to her parents, William O. Rawson (1877-1920) and Mabel Downing Rawson (1883-1962), Margaret was predeceased by her husbands, Malcolm Campbell and Jim Pitney, and a daughter, Mary Joan Campbell Arnold (1940-1990).
She was also predeceased by five brothers, Leslie W. Rawson (1912-1913), John T. Rawson (1918), Norman E. Rawson (1915-1928), Hufty T. Rawson (1909-1976), and Downing O. Rawson (1906-2002).
Arrangements are under the direction and care of Crippin Funeral Home, Montrose, Co.
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