The MacGregor Ranch and the women that ran it

Located in the Black Canyon Creek area of Estes Park, the MacGregor Ranch serves as a museum and a working cattle ranch. In 1873, Alexander and Clara MacGregor founded the MacGregor ranch, passing it on to their children over the years. Today it is the “last remaining working cattle ranch in Estes Park.” The original homestead house turned into a museum in 1973 and is open from June to October and hosts a multitude of people each year. Surrounded by mountains and majestic scenery, the historical homestead ranch is unique to Estes Park. Even more unique are the extraordinary women part of its story.

Muriel MacGregor

Muriel MacGregor was born on April 2, 1904, to Alexander and Clara MacGregor. She spent her childhood on the MacGregor Ranch but fell into higher education. An academic woman, she studied math at Colorado College and graduated in 1925; she then attended the University of Colorado, earning her History MA in 1931. Finally, she went to the University of Denver and earned an LLB in 1934. All the while, Muriel would return to visit the ranch. In 1936, she became “one of two women admitted to practice before the Colorado Supreme Court.” Once her parents died, she stayed on the ranch, beset by illness though as active as she could manage. Now in her 60s, lonely and becoming increasingly physically immobile, she looked for a friend. 

In October of 1964, Orpha Kendell moved to Estes Park and became close friends with Muriel. Orpha already knew of Muriel’s reputation in town, having heard stories of the “crazy Miss MacGregor.” By the spring of 1965, Orpha was visiting with Muriel nearly every day and driving her to the chiropractor once a week following stroke complications. Within a year, Muriel was too immobile even for Orpha to take to the chiropractor, much less help in and out of the car. Still, she loved to head off the ranch to drive around and look at cattle. She traveled to Fort Collins, Boulder, and Greeley to try to arrange a deal to leave the ranch to one of the universities there. Never married (perhaps by her parents’ own design), Muriel spent her last years tending to the ranch, bartering for help managing it through her disability, and searching out freedom, friends, and a future for her ranch. 

In Orpha, Muriel found someone to entrust the ranch to – not family, however distant, but the spiritual successor to her own love of the ranch and the community it fostered. Orpha became the ranch manager, and later trustee, after Muriel died on October 22, 1970. Friends for just over five years, the impact each woman made on the other’s life changed the heart of the ranch. 

Orpha Kendell 

Orpha Kendall moved to Estes Park in October 1964 with her husband Orval, and she met Muriel that same year in November. In Orpha, Muriel found someone to entrust the ranch to – not family, however distant, but the spiritual successor to her own love of the ranch and the community it fostered. Orpha became the ranch manager, and later trustee, after Muriel died on October 22, 1970. Friends for just over five years, the impact each woman made on the other’s life changed the heart of the ranch. 

Orpha engineered the opening of the museum at the ranch in 1973 after a protracted legal battle with MacGregor cousins over Muriel’s will and some obstinacy from Carlson. With a new administrator, Jim Beatie, Orpha was able to proceed with $2,500 on the condition that the museum open by the summer season. Having started work in November 1972, the team was ready to open the museum in May 1973. 

 Muriel’s mission continued all the while Orpha struggled to save the ranch from litigious family members, rising attorney fees, and a troublesome trustee. In 1975, Orpha was one of the signatories of twenty-five-year agreements with UNC and the BOCES (Northern Colorado Board of Educational Services) to use the ranch for outdoor education. The Heritage Camp program soon started up, and school group visits began to boom. By 1985, between four and five thousand students were visiting annually, and Orpha was already implementing plans to expand the education center. Orpha also joined in lobbying the National Historical Society to get the ranch listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The efforts of the trustees have paid off as 28 of the 42 buildings on the ranch are listed on the NRHP as of 2022. What saved the ranch from financial collapse was a conservation easement signed in October 1983 which Orpha helped to draft and negotiate with the National Park Service for a sum of four million dollars. With this contract secured, Orpha and the other trustees were able to set up an endowment fund to continue investing in the ranch. 

Orpha maintained that she could not have saved the ranch alone, even if her stubbornness and dedication to the ranch was the cornerstone the community needed. Women made up many, if not the majority, of the volunteers there. Harriet Burgess, who went on to manage the museum, Debbie Burgess, Edwina Horst, Kay Haughey, Joanne Slizeski, Opal Paglia, and Moline Marriott. Over two hundred locals volunteered their time to the MacGregor Ranch. “‘Most everyone falls in love with the ranch as soon as they hear a little bit,” noted Orpha. Orpha dedicated forty years of her life’s work. Becoming part of her life and her family’s, and the volunteers’ and their families, the ranch has turned into a place of community. 

Freudenburg, Betty D. Facing the Frontier: The Story of the Macgregor Ranch. Estes Park, CO: 

Rocky Mountain Nature Association, 1998.

Lindberg, James B., Patricia Raney, and Janet Robertson. Rocky Mountain Rustic: Historic Buildings of the Rocky Mountain National Park Area. Edited by John Gunn. Estes Park, CO: Rocky Mountain Nature Association, 2005.

Prosser, Glenn. The Saga of Black Canyon: The Story of the MacGregors of Estes Park. Estes Park, CO: Glenn Prosser, 1971.

“Trust History,” MacGregor Ranch, accessed December 2, 2022, https://www.macgregorranch.org/trust-history.