The following Denver Post photo and article was published on October 7

The following Denver Post photo and article was published on October 7, 1952, two days after Harry and Linnie's fifty-sixth wedding anniversary.

The article has several known errors. See the footnotes for comments by their grandson, Wilson Gateley.

The Photo (The girl with the snow-hat in the picture on the organ is their granddaughter, Mary Elizabeth Gateley.)

Floor plan of 1810 Willow Circle

Springs Couple Find Happiness Despite Tragedy, Financial Reverse

ELLEN O'CONNOR

Denver Post Special

COLORADO SPRINGS, Oct. 6.— Despite tragedy and financial panic, a plucky Colorado Springs couple celebrated their fifty-sixth wedding anniversary Sunday.

The pair, Mr. and Mrs. Harry York, whose more than a half century of married life saw more than an ordinary share of misfortune, seem to know no gloom.

In a cottage on Willow Circle in the Cheyenne canyon area, southwest of Colorado Springs, the Yorks combine the best of old-time and modern living in a way that brings them peace and happiness they have earned through years of hardship.

Each of the Yorks has a poignant story, packed with adventure. Their roads run separately for awhile, then suddenly meet in the high snowy land of Breckenridge and the Blue River mining country. It was here that the romance began which endured for fifty-six years and is still going strong.
HE CHOPS WOOD

At 84, York says, “We are going to take life easy now.” For exercise he chops wood at the big woodpile back of the house; comes in to town for a game of cribbage with cronies in Acacia park. At night he and his wife sing from the yellowed pages of old song books (see photo).

Mrs. York, who is 75, plays the music on an old reed organ that her parents bought for her when she was a girl.

The Yorks came to Colorado Springs in 1932. For twenty years he worked as ore inspector for the Golden Cycle mill.

Harry York was an English immigrant whose mother died¹ while en route to America. When he was 12 years old he ran away from a home ru1ed by a stepmother, hopped a freight train at Junction City, Kan. with only fifty cents in his pocket. He got off at Kansas City and got a job doing chores for a rooming house.

OPENS GROCERY.

Two years later York went back to Junction City when he fell heir to a fortune from England. He went to Denver and opened a grocery store and meat market in Highland, once an incorporated town, and now a part of Denver.

Then came the panic of 1893 and York lost every penny of his $35,000² savings.

York then took up a pick and shovel and went to work for the Barnum Water Works, and saved enough money for a mining stake and set out for the hills. At Breckenridge he found his mining dream fulfilled on the dredge boats on the Blue River.

“I had to have a place to eat.” York said, “So I hunted up a boarding house, and there I met and married Mrs. York. Her mother was the one who ran the boarding house.”

Linnie May, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Peabody, Breckenridge pioneers, was born in No Man’s Land—that strip of country up near Breckenridge that was never surveyed into the state of Colorado until about twelve years ago.

DAUGHTER DIES.

During the oil boom in Wyoming the Yorks moved to York Creek³ and he worked for the Ohio Oil company as a carpenter. There he almost lost a leg in a big fly wheel of a gasoline engine. However, York refused to have doctors amputate.

Misfortune struck again, this time in the death of their daughter and only child, Edna May. The Yorks raised their two grandchildren, Mary Elizabeth and Wilson York Gately. Later, tragedy again struck when the girl, Mary Elizabeth, was killed at the age of 16 in a fall in the mountains near her grandparent's home in Cheyenne Canyon.⁴

The grandson is now an instructor at Aberdeen proving grounds, living with his wife and two children at Darlington, Md.

HAPPINESS FORMULA.

The home of Mr. and Mrs. York is a house of memories . York still carries a gold watch fob made from the pure “wire” gold mined in the rich lodes of Farncomb Hill, where he once worked with his father-in-law. He had the gold encased in a little open-faced locket for his daughter, Edna May. When she died, it came back to him and he wears it in her memory.⁵

^{FOOTNOTES (by Wilson
Gateley):}

^{1: Harry's mother, Mary
Elizabeth York, died a few months after the York family arrived in
Junction City, Kansas.}

^{2: In 1889 he had
received a £179 bequest from his grandmother in England.}

^{3: They lived in
McFadden, Wyoming, where his son-in-law, Sydney Gateley, worked and
where I was
born.}

^{4: Mary Elizabeth
("Betty") died
in 1937 and Edna in 1943. I lived with my grandparents off and on
between 1940 and 1946.}

^{5. I now (2000) own the
locket, but it is attached to a necklace for my wife rather than a watch
fob.}