Sarah Allene Wise, a descendant of pioneering families in the St. Vrain Valley area, died this month at 103. After a lifetime dedicated to education and local history, her legacy lives on in the eponymous Wise Homestead Museum in Erie.
Wise started contributing to the Erie Historical Society in the early 1990s, writing and supporting grants for the renovation of the Wise Homestead farmhouse to become a museum. Her dream was fulfilled when the museum opened to the public 2007.
“It meant a lot to her,” said Wise’s niece, Elizabeth Wise Kissel.
Wise spent hours helping with the homestead’s renovation and once it became the museum, as a tour guide.
The Wise Homestead dates back to the mid-1800s, when her great-grandfather, Oliver Wise, and his family came from Wisconsin to settle in Colorado. He built a small log cabin and began to farm the land in the bygone Canfield, a community just west of Erie.
In 1870, he was granted a U.S. Homestead Patent on the property, and began building the two-story Western Victorian farmhouse that is now the museum, at 11611 Jasper Road.
“She was physically doing the work out there,” Kissel said of Wise working on the farmhouse renovation. “That was a family home that she didn’t grow up in, but we all were around it.”
Elizabeth Wise Kissel (left), and her aunt Sarah Allene Wise pictured in 2019. Kissel said family and friends knew Wise as “Allene,” so not to confuse her with her grandmother, who was also named Sarah. (Courtesy photo/Elizabeth Wise Kissel)
In later years, Wise served on Erie’s Historic Preservation Advisory Board, where she spent time working to preserve historic structures, documents and artifacts in town, until leaving the board in 2021.
“Most everything is built in the past,” Wise said in a 2021 interview. “If you don’t know what the past was, you don’t know much about the future.”
She talked about the legacy of her surname in a 20-minute audio interview from 1995, still available at the Carnegie Library for Local History in Boulder.
Wise, born in 1923, in the recording recalled that the land around the farmhouse was “barren” when her family first moved there.
“If you see the pictures of the house in 1870, there are no trees around it at all,” she said. “In 1892, a view of the same house, in the same position, shows the tops of the trees. Great-granddad had apparently brought some seeds, and maybe even some trees, with him when he came from the east.”
Wise was someone endlessly in pursuit of both learning and teaching, her niece Kissel said.
“She was always wanting to learn,” Kissel said. “She read the paper daily, cut out articles that she thought would be interesting for my cousin and I or other people. She was an avid reader; she taught medical technology students and encouraged them to always be thinking, and wondering why.”
Wise was valedictorian of Erie High School’s class of 1941, and went on to graduate from CU Boulder with a degree in Medical Technology before getting her master’s degree in Vermont.
She developed one of the first self-paced laboratory programs for students, and later was an evaluator of the medical programs with Project Hope in Brazil.
In 1973, she moved to Salt Lake City to begin studies for a PhD in Education Administration, obtained her degree in 1978, and went on to become the chairwoman of the Medical Technology program at the University of Nevada at Reno.
It was when she retired that she moved back to the Erie area. She held volunteer roles at the First United Methodist Church in Boulder, and volunteered for more than 15 years at the Boulder Community Hospital gift shop.
Wise was a long-time CU Buffaloes football fan who enjoyed horseback riding, skiing, dachshunds, and collecting gems, Kissel said.
She remembers her aunt as someone who “had a positive attitude every day.”
“She was a lifelong learner and gave back to the community and to the people she cared about,” Kissel said.
Editor’s note: This article includes quotes from an Oral History interview from the Carnegie Library for Local History in Boulder, OH0781, with Sarah Allene Wise.