When Harrison Slocum moved from Iowa in 1903, land sold for 50 cents an acre on the eastern plains. Slocum Road, which is five miles east of Falcon, is named after the Slocum family – one of the area’s first.Slocum married Florence Bell Salladay, and they raised nine children on a 1,000-acre ranch near Ellicott. Lucy Slocum, the only daughter born to the Slocums who now lives in Thornton, Colo., recalled what life was like on the ranch. “Besides working on the ranch, my father worked at both the Amo Creamery and the post office … and was also a deputy sheriff for a short time,” she said. “The plains were a nice place to raise a family. We lived in a valley, and weren’t bothered by the dust storms the other ranchers in the area experienced, but I do remember grasshoppers were a problem; they chewed up everything.”Marsha Coulson, Lucy Slocum’s daughter, said her grandparents “were good and honest people,” but some of her uncles were real “hell raisers” during their teen years, which caused locals to nickname them the “Dalton Gang.” However, when World War II began, most of the brothers joined the Navy, and, after the war, they came back to the Springs and settled down. Her uncle, Ray Slocum, gained notoriety when he was elected county sheriff in 1946.Records from the Pioneer’s Museum show that Ray Slocum only held the post for two years, but during that period, he solved two crimes that attracted national attention. The first case involved a handsome, young man named David Downey, who married a wealthy English woman with the intention of killing her for her money. Downey was so good looking that he had a fan club of young girls during his trial who claimed, “He’s too good looking to be a murderer.”Slocum proved Downey did strangle his wife on Rampart Range Road, but, after Downey’s mother slipped him six hacksaw blades so he could break out of the county jail, the case made the pages of “True Detective Magazine.” Lee Slocum, Ray’s brother, who was the jailer at the time, foiled the escape. Downey was eventually sentenced to “life at hard labor.”The most infamous case involved a local rancher named Junia Vandervoort. He lived 15 miles east of town near Drennan Road. In September 1941, he shot and killed his wife, but she wasn’t reported missing until 1947 when Slocum was sheriff. After two days of questioning both Vandervoort and his son, Slocum discovered the woman was killed during an argument. Finding out how she was killed was more difficult, and resulted in a gruesome tale.Bernice Slocum, who married Ray in 1965, said, “Ray always liked telling that story. It seems, even though the murder took place in 1941, the price of pork plummeted around the Springs after people found out Vandervoort got rid of his wife’s body by feeding it to the pigs.”While Ray left town after his term as sheriff, many of his siblings stayed in the area. Harrison and Florence sold the original homestead in 1948 for $10 an acre, and moved to the Springs. Lucy Slocum is the only one of their nine children still living, but many of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren still call Colorado home.
