Municipal Building (Hotel Flagler)

This two-story, red brick box, now stuccoed, has a front porch with a balustraded second-story balcony supported by square, fluted columns. Converted to a hospital in 1937 by Dr. W. L. McBride, it became the Flagler Municipal Building in 1967. Two years later the library moved in with its Hal Borland Room, commemorating the noted writer, novelist, poet, and naturalist who grew up in Flagler and spent his last years with the New York Times. The collection includes all forty-four of Borland's books as well as numerous articles and artifacts donated by his widow after his death in 1978. One of Borland's classic accounts of life on the high plains, Country Editor's Boy (1970), vividly describes the town which his father, editor of the local paper, boosted as “the Best Little City in Eastern Colorado, a community of tree-shaded streets and municipal power and water.” In his book Borland recalled that “waves of homesteaders had lonelied out or discouraged out or dried out.”