Gorrell Iron Works
Courtesy Your Hub, a Wednesday insert to The Denver Post, 12 June 2014, page 5A, in an article by Austin Briggs.
Courtesy Google Earth for the overhead photos.
Edited by David Barth, 16 June 2014. All surface photos are by David Barth.
The 1.6 acre property at the northwest corner of South Wadsworth Boulevard and West Florida Avenue was orignally part of the 320 acre William Gorrell dairy farm that began in the early 20th Century. In 1930 William gave the property to his son, Frank, who started Gorrell Iron Works. Arnold Kerstiens began working for Frank in 1954 and inherited the Iron Works in 1978 after Frank died.
In 2014, most of the property had been sold off, and only 1.6 acres remained. Kerstiens was age 79, and decided to sell the property that was to be used for a Sooper credit union, an arm of King Soopers supermarket.
In a 2014 interview, Kerstiens said that when he was six years old (around 1941), he recalled that his father, whose farm was about a mile east of the Gorrell property, took his plows to Gorrell for sharpening.
As a prime, corner lot on South Wadsworth Boulevard, the property has value. Kerstiens had been trying to sell it since around 2005, when he retired. His son-in-law, Ron Hepburn, kept the business going, but for many years the shop had transitioned from repairing farm equipment to constructing custom-built augers.
Much of the original equipment used in the shop was still operational. Some of it dated as far back as 1881. Heavy machinery included the original forge for working iron by hand, a massive metal shear, a punch, a roller to make round tanks that came from Blackhawk during the mining years, and auger manufacturing equipment.
The original buildings built in the early 1930s still stood before being razed during construction of the credit union.
These pictures were taken in June 2014 shortly before this historic Lakewood landmark was erased from the landscape. As the neighborhoods in Lakewood were built up during the last half of the 20th Century, there were some complaints that the Gorrell operation was an eyesore. The company tried to reduce the clutter of old farm and industrial equipment in the corner lot, but, along with the ancient, delapidated buildings, the site continued to look like a junk yard, slightly out of place in a suburban setting.
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| Gorrell Iron Works, courtesy Google Earth. |
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| Gorrell Iron Works, courtesy Google Earth. |
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| Gorrell Iron Works, courtesy Google Earth. |
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| Gorrell Iron Works. |