An expert saddlemaker working in a Colorado prison. A geographer running a small farm. A musician with brittle bones and an activist’s arrest record.
For microphone-wielding chroniclers, each of those three represents a part of a statewide puzzle with nearly 6 million pieces. To complete the picture of Colorado’s people — and to celebrate the state’s sesquicentennial next year — History Colorado is working to collect at least 150 oral histories from Coloradans.
Rather than pursuing a project that describes a period in the state’s past, the undertaking, called “A Portrait of Colorado at 150,” is designed to freeze the state’s present in audio amber.
The project will have a specific focus on capturing underrepresented voices, whether that’s Native American veterans, agricultural workers or the leatherworkers at the Fremont Correctional Facility. The goal, said Kim Kennedy White of History Colorado, is to create an audio mosaic: a collection of distinct voices and stories that, taken together, capture the state as a whole.
“In Colorado’s documented history, we definitely have gaps in the stories in our collection. Even though we have millions of artifacts and thousands of oral histories, we’re really interested in who are Coloradans today,” said Kennedy White, a folklorist and History Colorado’s associate curator of arts and leisure. “So ‘Portrait of Colorado at 150’ seeks to add stories from every corner of the state that will paint a portrait, if you will, of what makes Colorado Colorado today.”
Each oral history might come from a single person, or from several people describing one part of Colorado life. One of Kennedy White’s colleagues has collected “dozens of oral histories with farmer-ranchers around the state.”
The project is one of several birthday presents for the state that History Colorado is working on; another is adding 150 more historical sites to the state registry. Colorado’s 150th birthday — officially Aug. 1, 2026 — also coincides with the celebration of the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, which has added additional weight to the project, Kennedy White said.
To gather enough voices to create a representative chorus, History Colorado divided the state into eight regions and has used “demographic indicators” to guide curation and ensure it’s capturing representative samples of the state. That includes partnering with activists, local experts and museum curators across the state.
Kennedy White is conducting webinars to provide training on the collection of oral histories. History Colorado has created kits — with microphones and recording equipment — that chroniclers can rent, free of charge, and use to collect audio.
Teams will visit the state fair in Pueblo, watch the Southern Ute Indian Tribe’s bear dance, and take in local mainstays like the Wray Daze, the Moffat County Hot Air Balloon Festival and Strawberry Days in Glenwood Springs.
“We’ve worked really, really closely with (the Southern Utes) on our Ute bead collection, which is a large collection that we added to our collection a couple of years ago. That is unbelievable. It’s stunning, amazing pieces,” Kennedy White said. “But we’re interested in who made them. A lot of them are contemporary Ute bead workers, and so we’re planning to collect oral histories from a lot of those folks.”
The project will also lean on local experts, like Susan Jones, the collections manager at the Animas Museum in Durango, or Sarah Metsch, a disability-rights activist in Denver.
Jones says she views her role as more of a coordinator, and she hopes locals will be willing to interview their loved ones and gather their own personal histories. It’s an opportunity, she said, to collect stories of older community residents, who’ve seen Colorado (and the country) change.
The project will also capture more recent history that doesn’t yet feel like history at all.
“This might help fill in some gaps we have in our collection, for instance,” Jones wrote in an email. “We have (relatively) lots of photographs from the 1880s but not the 1980s. In fifty years, historians will want to know what it was like today, and this is our opportunity to leave our legacy.”
Kennedy White said the project will involve leveraging relationships that History Colorado has long worked to establish with underrepresented groups, while also endeavoring to form new ones. Jones said she hoped the project would help build trust with Durango’s Latino community, for instance.
Kennedy White estimated that roughly half of the oral histories had already been collected. It should take until early 2027 to collect and package the rest. History Colorado is still working out how it’ll gather and present the collected histories. They may become exhibits or be published for a wider audience.
Metsch, the disability-rights advocate, said her family has been in Colorado for nearly its entire history as a state, ever since her ancestors became homesteaders near Del Norte in the 1880s. History Colorado reached out to her to gather histories about the advocacy that Coloradans with disabilities have undertaken to help shape the state.
Of History Colorado’s current catalogue of 3,000 oral histories, only a dozen are from disability advocates, she said. She intends to add to that collection over the next year.
“Disability history is so rich here,” she said. The histories she’ll capture “might be a whole lot of different kinds of stories: stories of survival, of activism. Stories of creating a better way for individuals with disabilities to live an equal life.”
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