The town’s most well-known business was Weston Supply, a general store that had been the purveyor of miners’ goods and supplies for more than a century. Locals who need something, and don’t want to make the drive into Trinidad to get it, can usually find what they are looking for at the store/post office.
Wet Canyon was a deep chasm, cut by the Purgatoire River over a millennium of pelting rains and avalanches of snow. It was rugged and breathtaking. Sharon had fallen in love with thirty-five acres above the canyon. The views were stunning: twenty miles away Chuchara Pass could be seen, as could the snowy beauty of the Spanish Peaks. On a clear day, Mt. Baldy in New Mexico fractured the horizon with its stately, though simple, form. Sharon told Perry that they would build a magnificent home, the finest in the county, right there on a tree-studded spot along Cougar Ridge. Perry, as always, agreed.
For the dawn of a new decade, the mountains would be a good place to live. Sharon cajoled and begged. She used everything in her considerable arsenal of feminine skills. In 1980, the family had grown to include an infant daughter Sharon named Misty.
The mountains would be the perfect place to raise the perfect family.
The 1980s had begun with a land rush. It seemed more people were moving into Wet Canyon as the decade started than in the twenty years prior. While it was true the region was still sparsely populated, more folks were showing up. For old-timers there were new neighbors; for the new people there was an unspoiled beauty that they hoped their numbers wouldn’t eradicate. Ray and Candis Thornton were among the newcomers to the Canyon. By late spring of 1980, the real-estate developer and his kindergarten-teacher wife, were living in a log cabin, staking out a meadow that would be the site of their new ranch home.
One afternoon a Champion motor home pulled off to the side of the road. Both Ray, 38, and Candis, 35, had seen the rig before. The owners had bought a sizable tract of land not far from their place.
The wife carried an infant daughter while a little boy shadowed his father into the grassy expanse of the field. They introduced themselves as the Nelsons. They were living in the motor home until their house was completed.
“I instantly liked Dr. Nelson,” Ray later said. “But I didn’t like her. She was wearing extremely short shorts. She seemed loud, a little mouthy as she talked about her plans for her house.”
As the time passed and Ray and Candis Thornton got to know their neighbors better, they marveled over what it had been that brought the two of them together.
“Dr. Nelson was a real likable guy,” Ray said. “We often wondered how he could get involved with someone like Sherry. Their personalities were so different. Perry Nelson was a real professional type person. She was not. Not at all.”
The Weston store owner was another who would never forget Sharon Nelson during those early days. She was a friendly woman with a comment for everyone. Whenever she came in with her husband, she made sure everyone knew how much in love they were.
“Whenever I saw them they were lovey-dovey,” the store owner recalled. “She was hugging him and kissing him. That was Sharon.”
For some, an inspiration for a dream house is torn from the glossy pages of shelter magazines or culled from the cherished memories of their travels. That’s how Tudor homes get built in Boise and how adobe-style homes find their way to Virginia. More bad ideas are built from dreams than good ones. Sharon Nelson had tired of living in the little houses built by someone else; she wanted her own place. She wanted it to be big, grandiose, one of a kind.
Just like she saw herself.
The focal point was a six-sided great room that soared to a cathedral ceiling; a freestanding, double-flue fireplace would be put in place to provide warmth and ambiance. A wraparound deck, eight feet wide by 120 feet long, would provide all the outdoor living space anyone could ever desire. The master bedroom, also with a cathedral ceiling and outside entrance, was enormous at sixteen feet by twenty-eight feet. If the kitchen and the children’s bedrooms were less grand and seemed almost incidental, the house only reflected the priorities of its designer. This was a love nest and a place to show the world what she had. The fact water had to be hauled from a neighbor’s well only confirmed it. Who needs water when you have love?
Sharon even gave the place a name. And why not? Tara, the Biltmore, San Simeon… all were homes so distinctive, so important that they had been dubbed with a nickname. Sharon called her creation Round House.
Some considered the house “Doctor’s Folly,” built in a place without running water and phone lines for a woman few trusted. Others reflected on the woman who had been replaced.