People

: William Eaton

: William Edgar "Bill" Bedell

: William Edgar Pabor; Mesa County pioneer, poet, and the founder of Fruita, Colorado. He was born to Alexander and Mary Ann Pabor in Harlem, New York. US Census records list his father as a gardener, which might help explain the younger Pabor's later interest in fruit growing and horticulture. By 1854, at the tender age of nineteen, Pabor became the editor of the Harlem Weekly Times (source: National Endowment for the Humanities). Pabor also found early success for his poetry in national newspapers and magazines, such as the Fort Edward Ledger and Godey's Lady's Book. Pabor also published small volumes of poetry through publishers in Boston and New York. In 1870, Pabor left New York and came to Colorado as the secretary of the utopia-striving Union Colony, which later became Greeley. Pabor later edited the Longmont Valley, Home and Farm before it folded in 1879 (source: Longmont Ledger, September 3, 1911), and contributed agricultural articles to the Colorado Farmer and other newspapers. Even before moving to the Mesa County, Pabor had big plans for fruit growing on the Western Slope. The December 30, 1882 edition of the Grand Junction News mentions Pabor's visit to the area to research his coming publication, Fruit Culture in Colorado. He eventually moved to Grand Junction, where he wrote for the News and worked for the Grand Valley Loan and Land Company, helping to finance agricultural and irrigation development. After a short time in Grand Junction, Pabor moved west, where he founded Fruita with the vision of it being a fruit growing paradise… which it was until the coddling moth and persistent frost took their toll on fruit crops. Throughout his career in town building, fruit growing and finance, Pabor appears to have written. Along with luminaries such as Helen Hunt Jackson and Eugene Field, his poetry appears in the 1894 book, Evenings with Colorado Poets: An Anthology of Colorado Verse (and reappears in the second and third editions). In his book "Second Book of Tales," Eugene Field says that "Willie Pabor of Denver… had more of the afflatus in him than any other living human poet." His editor and poet friends recognized him by making him the poet laureate of the National Editorial Association from 1886 to 1901.

: William Edgar Roberson; He was born in Georgia. US Census records from 1880 show him living with his grandparents at the age of 12, working on a farm. He married Isabel Luts in Grand County, Utah in 1891. US Census records show that by 1900, they were living in La Sal, Utah, where he was a sheep rancher at the age of 32. By 1920, the family had moved to Mack, Colorado, where the family owned a general store, and lived in a home directly behind the store. He later returned to sheep ranching in Utah. It was most likely at this time, 1931, that he and Isabel Roberson were divorced.