People

: Harry Knight; Pioneer cowboy in Mesa County. Husband of Nettie (Stolze) Knight.

: Harry Lewis

: Harry Lewis Brown; An inventor, early miner, and processor of oil shale in Western Colorado. He was born in Heights Town, New Jersey to George Edward Brown and Sarah Catherine (Stoney) Brown. His father was a blacksmith and his mother was a homemaker. He married Penelope Chase Hamilton on April 18, 1908. They had a daughter, Penelope, and a son, Harry. The 1910 US Census shows him working as a tobacco salesman. According to his daughter Penelope, he then owned a Wrigley’s chewing gum factory. He was also invented a tab to open chewing gum packages and sold the patent to Wrigley. On a visit to Denver, someone brought a piece of oil shale into the Brown Palace Hotel where the family was staying, and this intrigued Brown. He sold the factory and, according to Armand de Beque, had $100,000 in initial capital to build a plant. According to his daughter, he founded the Index Oil Shale Company in 1921. Armand de Beque claimed that it was founded in 1918 and produced raw shale formula in 1921. The Index shale oil processing plant was built fourteen miles north of De Beque, Colorado, in Roan Creek Canyon. The Index Plant had more success than its predecessors in utilizing the oil, and it grew to be the largest plant of its time in the Western Slope. He learned much of the knowledge necessary to run an oil shale operation from books. He developed the retort used by the Index Plant and invented novel applications for the byproducts of the retorting process, some of which were marketed as consumer products. Among these was the Index Soil Vitalizer, a fertilizer made from shale residue. He also produced a medicinal salve that was marketed to the Western Slope through the C. D. Smith Drug Company. Both of these products were found by the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration to be carcinogenic and were taken off of the market, though Armand de Beque claimed that further testing showed that they were perfectly safe. According to oral history interviewee Glenn McFall, he ran his car on gasoline extracted from oil shale, which made it smell like the car was on fire. Harry refinanced the Index Plant in 1926, but lost his financing during the Great Depression. During that time, Harry opened a laboratory in conjunction with C. D. Smith and left his daughter Penelope and her husband William Joseph Eberhart as caretakers of the Index Plant, which they struggled to maintain. They sold off bits of the property to afford food before abandoning it altogether in October 1942. The 1930 US Census shows the Brown family living at 1848 Broadway in Denver, with Henry’s occupation listed as oil shale. The Browns eventually lived in Palisade before retiring to Grand Junction.