John Brisben Walker
109, Headquarters of the Army, Adjutant General's Office, April 20, 1866] for deserting his post as a sentinel in cadet barracks before being relieved, suspended for ten weeks and set back a semester.
Shortly thereafter, a family connection helped him find a place accompanying the newly-named Envoy of the United States to China, which was then recovering from a devastating 14-year civil war triggered by a man who claimed to be the son of God and a brother of Jesus that ended in 1865.
Strother had experience as a writer and illustrator for Harpers Monthly under the name Porter Crayon (America's Successful Men of Affairs, at p. 694 [Henry Hall, editor, Tribune Press, 1895]).
[2] He made his first fortune developing the property as a residential and industrial community, only to lose everything in the Panic of 1873 when variius railroads went bankrupt, causingf the failure of the banks that had financed them.
After his real estate venture collapsed, Walker was asked by the editor of the Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette to do a series of articles on the mineral and manufacturing industries of the West and their future prospects.
He moved his growing family to the District of Columbia and remained there until 1879 (America's Successful Men of Affairs, at p. 694 [Henry Hall, editor, Tribune Press, 1895]).
He purchased 1,600 acres in north Denver and used what he knew about irrigation to grow alfalfa as a cash crop (John Brisben Walker: A Man of Ideas [Edna Fiore, Morrison Historical Society, 2018 (https://morrisonhistory.org]).
This turned out to be a lucrative business and within ten years his Berkeley Farm was the largest alfalfa grower in Colorado, harvesting nearly 3,000 tons annually and containing nearly 200 miles of main and lateral irrigation ditches.
It featured a racetrack, medieval castle, baseball park, toboggan slide, an exhibition hall, and a grandstand with a capacity of 5,000 people in which Walker staged Denver's first rodeo.
He sold his Berkeley Farm to a group of investors and In 1889 used part of the proceeds to buy for $360,000 The Cosmopolitan, an insolvent monthly magazine with a circulation of 16,000 (Charleston Gazette, July 8, 1931).
Shortly after buying the magazine, Walker, on a ferry on his way to his office, read in The World that its star reporter Nelly Bly was about to embark on a round-the-world trip in an attempt to complete it in less time that the 80 days in had taken the hero of Jules Verne's popular novel published 16 years earlier.
Six hours after Walker arrived at his office, his 28-year-old literary editor, Elizabeth Bisland, was on a train to San Francisco to begin a race around the world in the opposite direction of Bly.
In 1893 Walker increased his wealth by selling River Front Park to the City of Denver, shortly before the Panic of 1893 that might have lost him his fortune for a second time.
In 1894, Walker and his family moved to Irvington, New York, a village on the shores of the Hudson River about 15 miles north of Manhattan that then had many of the wealthiest people in the country as residents.
The magazine offered an aggregate of $3,000 in prizes to whomever first completed the 52-mile round trip from City Hall, Manhattan, to the Ardsley County Club on the shore of the Hudson River in Irvington, and back.
Walker became enamored with the possibilities of the automobile, particularly steam powered vehicles made by the Stanley Brothers, one of whose cars had set a new speed record of 27.4 miles per hour in November 1898.
He partnered with Alonzo Barber, a fellow Irvington resident who made his fortune making and selling asphalt used to pave roads around the country, including Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
(Larsen) With some short interruptions, Walker's Tarrytown site continued to be used to build autos until June 1996, when General Motors finally stopped production of cars there and closed the facility.
In pertinent part, it read: “…a sudden change in public favor from steam to the French gasoline car left the company with branch houses from Boston to San Francisco and losses exceeding $1,700,000.
Mr. Walker personally assumed the indebtedness of the Mobile Company of America, and not only paid it off in full, but returned to every shareholder the amount of his investment, with interest.
On his return to Colorado with Ethel, Walker concentrated his efforts on developing real estate he earlier had accumulated around Morrison, a town not far from Denver.
On Mount Morrison, assisted by his eldest son, John Jr., he began developing Red Rocks with the dream of making it a world-famous music venue.
However, although he had some early success in his desire to make Red Rocks a renowned venue, this did not become a reality until long after Walker had lost ownership of the site.
He championed the idea of creating on a ridge east of that castle a Summer White House for Presidents of the United States, and in 1911 a foundation was built and cornerstone laid, but because of American involvement in World War I and a decline in Walker's fortunes the project never progressed past that point.
[bizjournal.com]) In 1912, an idea that Walker espoused took a step toward fruition when the Denver City Council agreed to create a system of mountain parks near Morrison.
In 1913, Denver Mayor Robert Speer managed to have a tax levy of one mill imposed to fund creation of the mountain parks system.
On January 1, 1913 yet another crusade of Walker's came to a successful end when Congress ordered the United States Postal System to allow parcels weighing more than four pounds to be mailed at reasonable rates.
Walker was an early peace activist, organizing a World Congress of 100 outstanding men in 1912 to try to mold public opinion against war.
In April 1918, a lightning strike started a fire that destroyed the mansion Walker had built atop Mount Falcon (Colorado Transcript [Golden, CO], April 25, 1918, p.3) Six months later, on October 28, 1918, in a home he owned in Denver, Walker, then 71, married 25-year-old Iris Calderhead, a firebrand women's suffragist (Denver Post, November 9, 1918, p.6, col. 1}.
Five years later, a New York State Census lists Walker, Ethel, and four children living in Stapleton, Staten Island, N.Y.
