Interview and written by Bonita Hutcheson.
Juanita Vigil was born in Santa Cruz, New Mexico, a city east of Espanola and North of Santa Fe, into a family of eleven children of which two boys and four girls survived. She says, "In May of 1953 my husband, Domingo, came from Santa Fe, New Mexico to find work and establish himself in Denver, Colorado. Five months later, after the birth of our third child, he moved his family to Denver where we lived for twenty-seven months." They had two more children - four girls and one boy - of which the four girls survive. Several of the children attended St. Patrick's school for a few years and all attended Fort Logan School, continuing on to Sheridan Union High School.
She
remembers, "the spring of 1955 we headed south on Federal
Blvd. in search of the site of the Harmony Homes Housing Development
in Sheridan [a small subdivision, from Federal to Irving and
Kenyon to Bear Creek Dr.]. When we reached the top of the hill
on Dartmouth Ave., I was so in awe of this valley below us, which
to me was a huge beautiful untouched green meadow. In the distance
we could spot a lovely gold dome, which we would later learn
was the location of the Littleton Court House. When we reached
the bottom of the hill where the Housing Development was, south
of the Old Hampden Road, there was an old two-story residential
home, close to the "show homes," on Green Court."
She said she desired, "to live close to the church [St. Patrick's which was replaced by Holy Name Church] and the school and that is what determined our having our house built on the 3600 block of S Irving Street." St. Patrick's, she remembered, "was very small and never crowded. It had two large [support?] pillars in the middle making it hard to get a coffin down the aisle. When it was tom down, a number of members took stones from the church."
She worked around Sheridan as the bookkeeper for the Holy
Name Credit Union, a medical transcriber at Fort Logan Mental
Hospital, seven years as the bookkeeper for Interfaith, and a
volunteer at Fort Logan School. Sheridan was a quiet town then
with "very little traffic on old Hampden Road - Loretta
Heights was separated from any dwellings, east of Federal there
were few homes, and the area known as Goat Hill, had even fewer
homes."
The Sandovals, who owned the property across from her, lived
there in an old house and the empty field on the corner of Lowell
and Kenyon, which became Kon-Tiki and later Bear Creek Mobile
Home Park. Domingo died in 1991, and she says with pride, "Now
I am the oldest and the only one of the original buyers to still
live on this street. Most of the homes have been sold and resold,
others are rentals. Not only have I witnessed the unbelievable
growth of this area, but also that of the neighboring cities
of Englewood and Littleton. For sure, it is a different world.
I am proud of Sheridan and plan to continue living here."