People

: Johannes "John" Appelhanz; He was born to Adam Appelhanz and Katherine (Lechman) Appelhanz in Rothammel, a German settlement on the Lower Volga River in Russia, where the family farmed. Adam Appelhanz immigrated to the United States and settled in Topeka, Kansas in early 1905. Passenger arrival records from Baltimore, Maryland indicate that his wife and children, including John, arrived on a steamship called the Chemnitz in July of 1905. They moved to Garden City, Kansas in 1906, Pueblo, Colorado in 1907, and Delta, Colorado in 1908, following work, primarily in the sugar beet fields. John attended school in Delta. US Census records indicate that the family had come to Olathe, Colorado by at least 1920, when John is shown living with his parents and six siblings at the age of twenty-one. His father was a farmer and his mother was a homemaker. He married Mary Unrein in Montrose on November 24, 1925. They continued to live with the Appelhanz family in 1930. By 1940, the census shows them living in their own home in Olathe, with six children. They moved closer to Montrose, in the Riverside area, in 1950. In all, they had seven children. John was a farmer. He died at the age of ninety-nine and is buried in the Grandview Cemetery in Montrose.

: John "Hooky John" Allison; A truant officer and pioneer in Grand Junction in the early Twentieth century. According to oral history interviewee Mary Cox, he rode a white horse and carried a bull snake. He would round up the boys who played hooky at Back of Stevie’s (a place on the Colorado River where boys would swim), and take them back to school.