920 Lincoln Ave History - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

sometimes in error with respect to the date of construction of Louisville buildings, so other evidence is looked to. In this case, the year given is very specific (unlike many other estimated dates given for Louisville houses such as "1900" or "1910"). Also, it makes sense that Alve Barretta would have had the house constructed soon after he purchased the lots, and he and his wife appear to be living in this location in the 1940 census records. Last, no evidence was found that would indicate that there was a house on these lots prior to 1939. For these reasons, the correct date of construction is presumed to be 1939. Alve Barretta was born in Louisville in 1910. His parents, Louis and Enrichetta Barretta, had emigrated from Italy just a year or two prior to his birth. He lived with his family at 821 La Farge and became a coal miner. At the time of the Monarch Mine explosion in January 1936, when he was 25, he was reportedly among those who first reached some of the bodies of the miners who perished in that explosion. In 1937, he married Alice Hackett (1917-2004). The 1940 census records show Alve and Alice Barretta to be living at 920 Lincoln Ave. with their son Louis, age 1. According to Alve and Alice's obituaries, the family moved to Denver in 1944. At that point, Alve Barretta sold 920 Lincoln to Joseph and Mary Kasenga. Kasenga Family Ownership, 1944 -1983 Boulder County records indicate that in 1944, Joseph Kasenga (1885-1977) and Mary Sirokman Kasenga (1891-1982) purchased 920 Lincoln. They were, at the time, approximately ages 59 and 53. In doing so, they continued their strong connection to the St. Louis School located behind 920 Lincoln. Also, the new St. Louis Church building had just been built a few steps away in 1940, and dedicated in 1942. Joseph Kasenga arrived from Slovakia in about 1904 and in 1909 married Mary Sirokman, whose parents were also Slovak. One of their five children, Elsie Kasenga Stucka, later wrote a family history that said that her father, when he first came to Colorado, worked in the steel mills in Pueblo and that in Louisville he worked in "practically all the mines in and around Louisville, Superior and Marshall." He was involved as a striker in the 1910-1914 strike. She wrote, "[f]irst, we lived in town in a house one half block from St. Louis Catholic School, 1008 Grant Street, and we all went to St. Louis Catholic School, even after we moved out on the farm. When I was six in 1919 we moved out on a ten acre farm Northeast of Louisville." According to Elsie Kasenga Stucka, her parents then purchased 920 Lincoln in 1943 and moved back to Old Town Louisville. (She evidently remembered her parents purchasing 920 Lincoln in 1943 as opposed to the year when the deed was recorded, which was 1944.) At the time that Joe and Mary Kasenga moved to 920 Lincoln, two of their sons, Albert and Jim, were serving in World War II. Elsie Kasenga Stucka also wrote of her father, Joe: "He had many responsible jobs in the coal mines. He received a shot fireman's certificate and for years he was the one who planted the charges of dynamite in the mines. He retired at the age of seventy-four. He and mother became 3