Dear Action Line: My wife and I were walking along East Third Avenue recently, and in front of one house we saw the stone in the picture I have attached. It was not a hitching stone for horses, as another photo I have illustrates. So we ask – what was it? A steppingstone for getting into a carriage? A family house sign of who lived there? – Bruce Baizel
Dear Bruce: Great question. Action Line is just stoked that such an interesting remnant of the past remains for all to see – yet ignored by many, including yours truly for decades.
So, what in tarnation is this deal?
In early stages of this investigation, it was conjectured that a Mercy Hospital physician lived here at one point. So then Action Line got to ask: Was there a doctor in the house?
The answer is yes.
Let’s start at the present and then time-travel back. The current homeowners, who have been there for several decades, are David and Carol Grenoble. They were kind enough to share what they know with Action Line, both in words and photos, and here’s the scoop:
“It is a carriage step, not a horse hitching post,” David Grenoble said. “It assists a lady up two steps into a horse-drawn buggy.”
And actually, he pointed out, a metal ring is attached to the concrete, so it does function secondarily as a place to tie your horse as well.
Now, back to the future.
The name on the stone reads “Haggart,” and that’s the family who put it there.
Dr. John Haggart, of Scottish descent, was born in 1865 in Quebec, Canada. He came to the United States in 1887, records show. He found his way to Durango, where he married Lounette “Nettie” Jackson on Feb. 14, 1893.
Census records reveal that the Haggarts moved into the Third Avenue house between 1900 and 1910, and by 1910 they had three sons.
Vehicles started arriving for good in Durango around the 1910s, and quickly drove out the old horse-and-buggy, taking over the streets and raising chaos when breaking the speed limit of 12 mph. It only took a decade or two before carriages were a remnant of the past.
Sometime before 1893 Haggart had become a physician. David Grenoble said that Dr. Haggart was a surgeon affiliated with Mercy, and it’s his understanding that Haggart performed the first appendectomy at Mercy in 1906, when people barely knew what appendicitis was.
John Haggart was a member of the Republican Party, and served as a delegate to the state convention in 1912, one of President William Taft’s supporters for reelection. For whatever that’s worth.
Nettie was a socialite of sorts, a member and president of the newly formed Durango Reading Club. Nettie came to Durango with her family from Kansas at age 12 in September 1881, just a month after the train line arrived. She related her story in “Pioneers of the San Juan Country, Vol. 1.” An excerpt:
“Our arrival was quite exciting, for there had been a shooting scrape ten minutes before the train arrived, and we were hustled into a big (horse-drawn) omnibus and driven away immediately.”
And there’s this nugget about Fort Lewis just after it was built south of Hesperus by the Army: “General William Tecumseh Sherman … made a military visit at the Fort in 1882.” Her father, Gilbert Jackson, a Civil War veteran who served under Sherman during the famous March to the Sea, was part of the local welcome committee. Gilbert insisted that Nettie be there to greet Sherman’s train.
“To my surprise and embarrassment the old general put his arm around me and stooped and kissed me. … Later I learned that kissing all the girls was quite an indoor sport with General Sherman.”
One of the couple’s sons, William, born in 1897, graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1922 and became a noted cancer specialist and surgeon in Denver. He helped organize the Colorado division of the American Cancer Society. Grenoble said that one of John and Nettie’s grandsons came by to visit the Durango house one day and that he and the grandson had a good long chat.
The Haggarts apparently sold the house in the mid-1930s, steppingstone and all.
Email questions and suggestions to actionline@durangoherald.com or mail them to Action Line, The Durango Herald, 1275 Main Ave., Durango, CO 81301. You might think this current presidential election cycle is nuts. In 1912 it was nuttier. Taft and Theodore Roosevelt dueled for the Republican presidential bid, with Taft barely earning it at the national convention in June. The fiery Roosevelt ran anyway, as a third-party candidate, paving the way for Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency. It is doubtful that Teddy would have considered it manly to use a steppingstone, but that’s his problem.
