Mt. Evans, Colorado, Morning

George Elbert Burr

Colorado’s Mt. Evans was named after the second territorial governor, John Evans. In 2023, the Federal Board of Geographic Names voted to rename the mountain Mount Blue Sky, honoring the indigenous Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes. Mount Blue Sky towers over Metro Denver at it is the highest peak in the Mount Evans Wilderness in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains of North America. Brookvale is a populated area in Clear Creek County.

George Elbert Burr, painter, printmaker, and illustrator, was born in Munroe Falls, Ohio on 14 April 1859 to Linus E. and Lucy Ellen Gaylord Burr, and was raised in Cameron, Missouri. Burr moved to Denver, Colorado in 1906 for health reasons. He spent the next 18 years there creating a body of intaglio prints that focused on the desert and mountain landscapes of the southwest.

A few of his color etchings were included in the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition and the following year he was represented by two etchings in the First Annual Exhibition of the Brooklyn Society of Etchers at the Brooklyn Museum. For health reasons, Burr had to leave the winter chill of Denver and purchased a home in Phoenix, Arizona in 1927.

Burr was in the unique position of self-promoting his work and in January 1930 wrote to R. P. Tolman, assistant curator at the Smithsonian Institution: "It's lots of fun to be a 'poor artist.' Nearly fifty years I've been, except for health limitations, supremely happy in my work, and am constantly surprised in the number of people that also seem to get pleasure out of my labor. It seems so odd, that without effort, I've always sold more than Mrs. Burr and I have needed for all our fourteen years of travel and other so-called luxuries."

George Elbert Burr died in Phoenix, Arizona on 17 November, 1939.