On July 27, 1948, an auctioneer stood on the grounds of the Divide school and sold everything. The land and the building went to Jim Harn for $1,400. The school bell went for $12, the kitchen range for $10, and the piano for $20.
You have almost certainly driven past that building today. It's the big wooden structure at the southwest corner of U.S. 24 and Highway 67, most recently known as Gateway Of Praise Worship Center. Local historian Steve Plutt wrote about it this spring with the Ute Pass Historical Society, as part of the Pikes Peak Courier's 250/150 history series, which marks Colorado's 150th birthday and the country's 250th. In that piece, he reports that the 1890s schoolhouse is still inside the building. For more than seventy years, owners remodeled, renamed and added on to it without ever tearing it down.
That's the reason this corner matters now. Plutt's April 29 history of the Divide Schoolhouse closes by saying the whole building will be razed, the site lowered and leveled, and apartments built. Since the schoolhouse went up in the 1890s, every new use on this corner has been built around the old school. The reported plan would be the first to start over from bare ground.
Ten families and a railroad
Settlers arrived in Divide in the 1880s, but the town didn't really grow until the Colorado Midland Railroad came through in 1887. In spring 1890, ten local families petitioned for their own public school district. They won. Hayden Divide School District No. 51 was created, and 22 local children had their own school.
The school grew as farming in the area grew. The Divide PTA formed in fall 1921, and its members raised money for school play costumes, Christmas treats and subsidized hot lunches. By 1924, 48 children attended District 51, more than twice the first class. High school grades were taught there by then, and the classrooms were crowded.
The crowding is what ended the school. Divide's high school merged with Woodland Park in 1945. Three years later the entire district followed, and the building went to auction, bell and all. A school that had outgrown its building ended up selling the building itself.
The names on one corner
Once the bell was gone, the building settled into the role it would hold for most of the next forty years. It became a place to eat and drink at the crossroads. Here is the run as Plutt tells it.
| Years | Name | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1890s to 1948 | Divide school, Hayden Divide School District No. 51 | Sold at auction for $1,400 after the district merged with Woodland Park |
| 1951 to about 1954 | Bobbie's Café | Grand opening May 6, 1951; closed after a state and federal gambling raid |
| 1957 | Trout Haven Café | Grand opening September 22, 1957, with a seven-unit motel added on the west side |
| 1971 | Same restaurant and motel, new owners | An Ohio family bought it and listed it for sale about a year later |
| Following years | Boar's Head Inn, J.R.'s Restaurant & Lounge, Mr. R's Rustic Inn, Rainbow Gardens supper club | A series of restaurant names |
| December 24, 1978 | Rainbow Gardens Motel | Fire leveled all seven motel units early that morning |
| 1980 | The Divide Inn | Short-lived ownership |
| July 1981 to fall 1988 | Dirk's Family Restaurant | Also known as The Ranch Restaurant and The Summit Restaurant and Wild Rose Saloon |
| After 1988 | Several operators | Owners came and went; none lasted |
| Most recently | Gateway Of Praise Worship Center | Building reported in April 2026 as slated to be razed for apartments |
Trace the table and the motel is the part that didn't survive. It went up in 1957 beside the café and burned on Christmas Eve 1978. The old school building outlasted it, and each new owner moved into it.
The two runs that worked
Two businesses in that table did well, and the history explains why.
The first was Bobbie's Café. Within three years of the 1948 auction, a woman from Dayton, Ohio, had bought the building from Harn and remodeled it heavily. Her grand opening on May 6, 1951 drew people from Woodland Park, Florissant and the Cripple Creek-Victor District, and the café became a popular gathering place. Some of that popularity may have come from the wide range of gambling devices inside. The Courier account says state and federal authorities raided Bobbie's as an illegal gambling house and shut it down around 1954.
Look at that guest list. Woodland Park sits east up the highway, Florissant west, and the gold camps south down Highway 67. The building stands where those three directions meet, so it drew from all of them. A café on the corner where the district's roads crossed did what the schoolhouse had done for District 51 families. It gave people a reason to come to the same room.
The second was Dirk's Family Restaurant. Eric Dierkhising bought the building in July 1981. Under three names, his restaurant was the most popular place around for quite a while, until he sold in fall 1988. Plutt calls Dirk the last owner who succeeded there.
The run between those two shows what usually happened there. Baron Frederick von Schleinitz bought Bobbie's in 1957 and reopened it that September as the Trout Haven Café. The motel he added stayed busy every summer. After that came the 1971 sale, then the Boar's Head Inn, J.R.'s, Mr. R's and Rainbow Gardens. A business on this corner rarely kept the same name for long.
Why the record goes blurry after 1988
The Courier history doesn't name the businesses that followed Dirk's. It says a few owners tried and couldn't make the place work. Restaurants and building owners came and went so often that the record became, in Plutt's words, "quite homogenized and very difficult to keep track of."
So for anyone who has lived in Divide since the early 1990s, this corner has probably never felt like the gathering place it was in 1951 or 1985. The building kept standing with the schoolhouse inside it. What dropped away was a business at the crossroads that drew the whole district in, and that loss came decades before any apartment plan.
Where the congregation meets now, and which apartments are which
The most recent use has already moved. Gateway of Praise's own website lists its location as Summit Elementary School, 490 Meadowpark Dr., Divide, with Sunday worship at 10:30 a.m. and a Thursday evening dinner fellowship at 6:00 p.m. If you're used to seeing cars at the corner on Sunday mornings, that's why they may not be there.
The Courier piece describes the redevelopment in one sentence. The building will be razed, the grade lowered and leveled, and apartments built. It gives no date for the work and doesn't name a developer or unit count.
That apartment plan is separate from the one Divide has read more about this year. Crossroads at Divide is a 36-unit, three-story project with 12 one-bedroom and 24 two-bedroom apartments, as the Gazette reported in May. AmericaWest Housing Solutions and Riverstone Platform Partners are the developers. It received state and federal housing tax credits in the 2026 first round, according to the Gazette's coverage of the awards. The Colorado Housing and Finance Authority's 2026 award report puts that project at Clark Ranch Road and Lone Ranger Road, not at the old schoolhouse corner. When someone at the post office says "the apartments going in at the crossroads," they could mean either one.
The bell went first
The building's first loss was its $12 bell, carried off at the 1948 auction. It has since been a café, a trout café, a supper club, a family restaurant, a saloon and a church, and the old school stayed inside the walls through all of it. Plutt's series is still running in the Courier, with 2026 installments on the Pikes Peak Granite Company and Lanter City. Until the grading starts, the Divide Schoolhouse installment is the most complete account of this corner, and the building it describes is the one at the traffic light.
Many older buildings around Divide and the gold district have a past like this, with additions, name changes and an original structure still inside. If you own one, its history is part of its value, and Gold District Realty can help you put both on paper. Start with an Instant Property Valuation, and then tell Ruthie what your building used to be.
