The Tea Rooms of Estes Park

Estes Park proved to be an area where women could successfully run businesses. Many took the Homestead Act as a way to gain land ownership and start their own business. Women in the area like Anna Wolfrom Dove, Katherine Garetson, and Yaye Kato owned Tea Rooms. Tea Rooms served tea as well as other snacks and food to their local communities. These places became a hub for togetherness and became synonymous with women owned businesses in Estes Park.

Ana Wolfrom, born March 1872 filed a homestead claim in 1907 for land near Estes Park, Colorado and opened the Wigwam Tea Room in 1914. Janet Robertson in Rocky Mountain Rustic notes that Wolfrom was the first unmarried woman in the region to receive a land title after proving up a land claim. The Wigwam Tea Room, the structure of which still exists today, is located about a mile and a half north-west of Lily Lake. The Wigwam, as well as the other structures on Wolfrom’s old property, though all completely out of use today, are under the National Park Service’s purview. In its heyday, the Wigwam Tea Room was a popular destination for travelers on foot or horse, and eventually by car. However, now the buildings are only accessible via a two-mile hike.

Katherine Griffith Garetson, born July 1, 1877, in Terre Haute, Indiana, was the only currently known tea room proprietress in the Estes Park region to record extensively her experience proving up on a homestead claim and starting a tea room business. Garetson had clear motivations and dreams to live “the romance of the simple life [of] pioneers.” Garetson was successful enough to keep operating the tea room for many years, but not, it would seem, successful enough for her to live off only that one stream of income. To make ends meet, she convinced an elderly and wealthy friend of the family with tales of adventure to loan her money to continue homesteading. During the off season, Garetson would leave Estes Park to work as a stenographer and other jobs in St. Louis.

Yaye Kato (née Nakayama) was born on May 10, 1901, in Okayma, Japan. At the age of ten, Kato immigrated to the United States. Together, the couple moved to Estes Park towards the end of 1927 where Ryoji opened Kato Art Shop, a gift shop where he sold Asian art. In June 1929, Yaye gave birth to her only child, a daughter named June. According to The Estes Park Trail, Yaye Kato opened the Oriental Tea Garden on June 21, 1931. There is little information about the tea room or its proprietress for the following year until Yaye Kato died somewhat suddenly from “a complication of illnesses” in a sanatorium in Boulder, Colorado, aged thirty-one.

These three women showcased the opportunities of proprietorship that Estes Park had to offer. Their legacies paved the way for many other women to own businesses and created equal economic footing for women, a rarity in the late 19th century. 

James H. Pickering, America’s Switzerland: Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, the Growth Years. Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 2005.

James Lindburg, Patricia Raney, and Janet Robertson, Rocky Mountain Rustic: Historic Buildings of the Rocky Mountain National Park Area, ed. John Gunn. Estes Park, CO: The Rocky Mountain Nature Association, 2004.

Jane Robertson, The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 1990.

Katherine Garetson, Homesteading Big Owl, Allenspark, CO: Allenspark Wind, 1989.

Nina Jones Kunze, Anna Wolfrom Dove and the Wigwam Tea Room: The Remarkable Single Woman Homesteader and the History of Her Legendary Tea Room in the Rocky Mountains Self publicized, Create Space, 2019.

“Oriental Tea Garden Will Open June 21st,” Estes Park Trail, June 19, 1931, https:/

www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=ETG19310619-01.2.1&e=-------en-20-ETG-1--img-txIN%7ctxCO%7ctxTA-yaye+kato-------0------.