Palmer Divide Research

Indian Doctor's Place

Also: Yosemite Nabona's sanatorium

Stores, hotels and other businesses before 1950Historic or vanishedEl Paso County

What we know

Sanatorium run in the late 1920s by Yosemite Nabona, whom the library's record calls a Navajo doctor: ten buildings on five acres, including a nurses' dormitory and a 35-by-70-foot main building (PPLD records of survey B21; the 1987 Black Forest Preservation Plan's Map 2 No. 21). Yosemite Nabona came about 1928 (Ellett), after a hurricane wrecked his Florida sanatorium (von Ahlefeldt). The Trumps gave the land: five acres (von Ahlefeldt) or two, with three more bought (Ellett). A 1929 Gazette article put spending at $60,000. He left in the early 1930s over 'marital troubles' (von Ahlefeldt p. 84), or was 'run out of town' in 1934 for practicing without a license (Ellett p. 24). The place was a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, the 'Black Forest Camp', in 1935-36, then a camp for transient girls (Ellett p. 25).

Where it was

10525 Black Forest Road, 'just south of Tobin Road' (PPLD records of survey photos B21); El Paso County street-range interpolation (2026-10-05), which falls 115 m south of the Tobin Road crossing in OpenStreetMap, as the record says. Good to a few hundred feet.

A street address placed along its block; good to a few hundred feet.

See it on the map

Sources

Sources are named in the text above. Numbers such as S-0080 refer to our source list. Most newspaper quotations were read in the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection. Long quotations from recent books are shortened here.

Know more about Indian Doctor's Place?

Corrections, family stories, photographs, deeds, letters and maps are all welcome. Messages and files come to Michael Christensen privately; nothing appears on the site until it has been checked, and you'll be credited the way you ask.