Colorado Community Media covered the walk. Coffee mugs and T-shirts went out under a tent on Main Street again this year, the same tent where American Legion Post 82 has served lunch to walkers for over a decade. The Historic Walk and Talk gathered Saturday morning, September 26, at its usual starting point: the Gesin Lot, a town-owned parcel at 165 S. Main Street on the corner of Highway 86 and Main. Walkers checked in, grabbed coffee, and set off down Main Street and up Banner toward the old Frontier High School and the American Legion Hall before looping back to the same lot for lunch.
The Gesin Lot is both the walk's starting point and a downtown redevelopment opportunity the Town of Elizabeth is marketing to developers. The town homepage lists it as "Gesin Lot Mixed-Use Redevelopment Opportunity." The history tour and the development listing share an address.
A Walk That Draws a Crowd
The Historic Walk and Talk has drawn crowds over the years. About 100 people showed up in 2022, when local historian Jeff Lehman led an informative tour along Main Street covering the town's early days. Roughly 90 attended in 2023, on what one recap called a beautiful, warm fall day, with the Elbert County Museum setting up alongside a local author signing. By 2024, a train-themed edition pulled in more than 130 people, with the Elbert County Museum returning to add historical context.
The guides have stayed largely the same across those years. Bob Rasmussen, historian for the Town of Elizabeth Historic Advisory Board, has walked crowds past the First National Bank Building at 188 South Main Street, a structure that hit the National Register of Historic Places in 2023 and turns 119 years old this year, having gone up in 1907. Joe Martell, president of the Elbert County Historical Society, has co-led the tour alongside Rasmussen and Lehman. Town Planner and Project Manager Alexandra Cramer has described the event's purpose plainly: it guides participants through Elizabeth's historic areas, sharing stories about the town's significant buildings and sites.
The people showing up aren't all first-timers hunting for a novelty outing. Longtime residents Jan Mauer and her sister Gay Ramsauer attended for the first time in 2024 despite having lived in the area for years. Steve and Jane Rice, who have lived near Casey Jones Park since 1994, said they'd simply never made time for it before. That's the pattern with a lot of small-town institutions: they run quietly in the background for a decade before enough people notice them at once.
The Lot Itself Has a Second Job
The Gesin Lot serves as a gathering spot and is also a redevelopment opportunity. The Town of Elizabeth project page describes 165 S. Main Street, situated at the corner of State Highway 86 and Main, as available for purchase and development by qualified individuals, companies, and firms. It has carried that designation since at least 2025, and it's still listed as an active opportunity on the town's site as of this fall.
The parcel Elizabeth uses every September to celebrate its Main Street history is also being offered by the town for future development. The listing is posted on the same website, a few clicks from the walk's event page.
A few blocks over, the Main Street Station project offers an example of redevelopment after approval.
What Approval Already Looks Like on Main Street
On January 27, 2026, the Town of Elizabeth Board of Trustees approved a site plan for a project called Main Street Station, covering 2.1 acres along Main Street between Spruce Street and Walnut Street. The plan calls for two, two-story mixed-use buildings, and the town's press release described the goal: adding new commercial activity, dining options, and flexible residential or professional space directly along Main Street, reinforcing downtown as the community's economic and social center. Mayor Angela Ternus put it more bluntly in the release, saying Main Street Station will jumpstart and enhance Elizabeth's downtown.
That approval didn't come out of nowhere. It came after years of physical groundwork on Main Street itself. The Main Street Streetscape Project traces back to a 2009 Community Revitalization Partnership Report and a 2015 Downtown Strategic Plan, two planning documents that sat around for the better part of a decade before construction crews showed up. Work finally broke ground in September 2024, funded by a mix of Colorado Department of Local Affairs and CDOT grants totaling $1.25 million alongside town capital funds, with a total project budget not to exceed roughly $2.9 million. Curb, gutter, sidewalk, streetlights, and new parking areas went in through the spring of 2025, timed deliberately so the corridor would be presentable for that June's Elizabeth Stampede and Elizabash events.
Tucked inside that same streetscape push was the Depot Parking Lot, a new 100-plus space lot at 455 E. Spruce Street that opened in the fall of 2025 alongside a detention pond in Running Creek Park. It's now the answer to the practical question every downtown event generates: where do I park in Elizabeth? The town's Main Street district put it simply when the lot opened, inviting people to take a drive, park with ease, and explore historic downtown Elizabeth.
So by the time trustees signed off on Main Street Station in January, the corridor already had new curbs, new lighting, and a new parking lot built specifically to support more foot traffic. The infrastructure came first. The buildings are next.
Two Buildings, Two Blocks, One Pattern
Main Street Station isn't on the Gesin Lot. It sits between Spruce and Walnut, a separate stretch of Main Street a short walk north. But the shape of the project reads like a preview. Two-story, mixed-use, ground-floor commercial and dining with residential or professional space above, built directly onto a Main Street that just spent close to three million dollars rebuilding its bones. If a developer eventually takes the town up on the Gesin Lot listing, this is roughly the template they'd be working from, minus the corner lot's added visibility at the Highway 86 intersection.
The Historic Advisory Board that runs the walking tour has been doing this kind of connective work since 1998, reenacted in 2015, with a mandate to recommend properties for local landmark designation and educate the public about the town's history. It meets the first Monday of every month at 4:30 p.m. Its work and the town's development office work sit administratively close together, both housed at Town Hall on South Banner Street, which is itself one of the stops on the walking route.
None of this makes the Gesin Lot's future a settled question. The town's listing has been up for at least a year without a confirmed buyer or a public timeline, and unlike Main Street Station, there's no approved site plan attached to it yet. What is settled is the direction. Elizabeth spent a decade planning a rebuilt Main Street, then spent two construction seasons building it, then approved its first major private mixed-use project on that rebuilt corridor after the concrete had cured. The Gesin Lot is the next logical parcel in that sequence, and everyone who has ever grabbed a coffee mug at the Historic Walk and Talk has already stood on it.
The Walk Will Probably Look Different Before Long
If the pattern holds, next year's walk or the one after might not start in an open lot at all. It might start in the lobby of whatever gets built there, or move its gathering point down the block. Either way, the version of the Gesin Lot that has hosted years of coffee, lunch, and history lessons may change if the parcel is developed, and the opportunity remains listed on the town's website.
The Main Street corridor is changing as planning and construction move forward. The walking tour will keep teaching people about the 1907 bank building and the old Frontier High School either way. It just might, before too long, be doing it from a different starting line.
If you're curious what a changing Main Street means for property values, permitting, or timing a move in Elizabeth or anywhere else along the Front Range, Jena Vail is glad to walk through it with you. Let's Connect.
