![]() McHugh, who also went on to be mayor, from 1903-04. Harris served as the mayor of Fort Collins in the late 1800s. Andrews traded the home for Jessie Harris' farm in 1893. ![]() ![]() Charles Andrews, a cattle rancher and banker, purchased the unfinished home that year for $5,200 and hired architect Montezuma Fuller to complete it. "We hope she would have enjoyed that.Known as the McHugh-Andrews House - and sometimes “the Mayor’s” house - this beautiful stone, Romanesque Victorian home was built with locally-quarried sandstone in 1889. "We engraved it with 'Well-behaved women rarely make history,'" Juszak said of LaFitte's headstone. Juszak said Fort Collins Tours is looking to recoup the funds they spent on LaFitte's headstone through sold-out haunting investigations at Café Ardour, 255 Linden St., Pinball Jones and underneath Beau Jo's Pizza Friday night. Her death made the front page of the Fort Collins Morning Express and, in the Fort Collins Weekly Courier, she was referred to as someone, "who gained so much notoriety through suing and being sued that she died before all her fights had been settled." She died of an undisclosed illness at the county hospital on March 18, 1914. "Marie is a sure enough fighter," they read. She was also accused of distributing liquor in a dry Fort Collins, operating her brothel on Linden Street (where Cafe Ardour is today) and being a "lady of the night."Īccording to "Fort Collins Yesterdays," some reports from that time show a sort of "grudging admiration" for "the tough old days" she did business in. At one point, she owned a building on Jefferson Street, but didn't pay taxes on the property and ended up fighting for it - and losing - in court. La Fitte was born in 1844 in France and moved to Fort Collins around 1900. "People can now go over to the cemetery, see where they're buried and remember them," she added. "Number one, it was unfair that they weren't given headstones - one because she was murdered," the other (LaFitte) because she ran a brothel, Juszak said. Outraged community members hanged James Howe that night in the only recorded lynching in Fort Collins and the couple was buried side-by-side in unmarked graves in Grandview Cemetery. Lori Juszak, one of the owners of Fort Collins Tours, said she came across the story of LaFitte while the business was raising money for a headstone for Eva Howe, who tragically made Fort Collins history when her husband James came home drunk and murdered her on April 4, 1888. The business recently fronted the money for a headstone for Madame LaFitte, who was buried with no markings in a potter's field at Grandview Cemetery in 1914. Thanks to Fort Collins Tours, a local tour company, she'll also be remembered in another way. In 1905, at the age of 61, she landed in jail after locking herself in her home and nearly blinding the deputy who came to arrest her over a property dispute. The stacks of court documents and various newspaper clippings paint her as a brothel owner who ran into her fair share of legal scrapes over property, prostitution and alcohol distribution. But now, 100 years after her death, the legend of Madame Marie LaFitte is reduced to a couple of boxes at The Fort Collins Museum of Discovery's history archive. At the turn of the 20th century, she was infamous.
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