Drive down First Avenue in Deer Trail and the storefront at 618 1st Ave still has a for sale sign taped to the glass. Behind it sits a dining room, a full commercial kitchen, a stocked bar, pool tables, and a rear patio big enough for outdoor seating. On paper it is a turn-key restaurant waiting for someone to flip the lights back on. In practice it has been closed for years, and Yelp's own listing for the place still marks it "closed" as of this past July.
That building has a name almost everyone in town knows: the Brown Derby. What most people do not know, unless they have spent time with the local history written up by longtime resident Ron Schaffer, is that this is not the first time the Brown Derby's predecessor has had to shut its doors and figure out where to go next. The building's whole history is a story about closing and reopening somewhere else. The current "for sale" sign is just the latest chapter, and it is worth understanding the earlier ones before deciding what this one means.
A Building That Has Closed Before
According to Schaffer's account, the town's first bar was not the Brown Derby at all. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a man named Lon Sniff built the first brick building in Deer Trail and ran a saloon out of it, with the upstairs doubling as a dance hall, a roller rink, a theater, a church, and even the town's first high school classroom. When Arapahoe County went dry around 1917, ahead of national Prohibition, Sniff's saloon could no longer legally operate where it stood. He moved his business a few miles south, just across the county line into Elbert County, to a spot locals nicknamed "Binnville," and kept pouring drinks there until repeal in the early 1930s.
Once Prohibition ended, a new business took over the gathering-place role back in town. In May 1935, Dorothy Crandall was granted a liquor license for her Crandall Cafe, which also housed a roller-skating hall. A year later she moved the restaurant down the block and gave it a new name: the Brown Derby. The name has nothing to do with the famous Hollywood chain of the same era. Crandall simply liked it.
Here is the short version of how the building's identity has shifted over roughly 125 years:
| Era | What stood there | Why it changed |
|---|---|---|
| Early 1900s | Lon Sniff's saloon, the first brick building in town | Arapahoe County went dry around 1917, forcing it to close |
| 1917 to early 1930s | A relocated saloon just south of the county line, called "Binnville" | National Prohibition kept business legal only outside Arapahoe County |
| 1935 | Dorothy Crandall's Crandall Cafe, newly licensed to serve drinks | Prohibition had ended and the cafe added a bar |
| 1936 | Renamed the Brown Derby after moving down the block | Crandall gave the business a new name at its new address |
| Today | The same building at 618 1st Ave, listed as a turn-key opportunity | Closed, still on the market as of this summer |
A building that has already survived one countywide shutdown and one relocation over a legal line is not a building whose story ends with a for sale sign. It just means the town is between chapters again.
Two Vacant Landmarks, Same Stretch of Town
The Brown Derby is not the only community gathering space currently sitting empty and listed. A former Elks Lodge elsewhere in Deer Trail is also on the market, and it tells a similar story from a different angle. That building has a large open hall with vaulted ceilings and a stage, two private offices, a bar area with a pool table and walk-in cooler, a covered patio, and an upper-level loft with its own secondary bar setup. It was built for meetings, dances, and exactly the kind of civic life a lodge exists to host, and now it is looking for a buyer too.
Two buildings built for the same purpose, standing empty at the same time, is not a coincidence worth panicking over. It is closer to what happens in a town this size: when a business built for gathering closes, the gap does not stay empty forever, but it also does not always get filled by the same kind of business. Sometimes the gathering moves somewhere that was not built for it at all.
The Library Inside the School
For Deer Trail, one of those somewheres is Davies Library, which is not a standalone building but a branch tucked inside Deer Trail School with its own separate entrance. It is part of the Arapahoe Libraries system, and it runs the kind of regular programming that keeps a small town's calendar full even without a bar on the corner: toddler storytimes, a family book club that recently worked through The Book Thief, and drop-in help from a library tech specialist for anyone who needs a hand with a phone or a laptop. The branch also has a meeting room that seats between seven and twenty-five people and two smaller study rooms, plus a partnership with Dolly Parton's Imagination Library that mails free books to children in the community.
None of that replaces a bar and a kitchen. But it is real, regular, and open on a predictable schedule, which is more than the Brown Derby has offered in a while.
The One Weekend First Avenue Still Fills Up
If there is a night the town still gathers the old-fashioned way, it is rodeo weekend. Deer Trail's claim to fame, printed on the town's own welcome materials, is that it hosted the world's first rodeo, an event local history traces back to a bet among working cowboys in 1869 on the banks of the East Bijou Creek near where the rail line ended. The Colorado Pro Rodeo Association still puts on the Deer Trail Rodeo every summer at the Deer Trail Arena, two days of bronc riding, bull riding, barrel racing, and the kind of small-town crowd that a single closed restaurant cannot keep away.
A two-day rodeo once a year is not the same as a bar open every weekend, and nobody in town would tell you otherwise. But it is the one weekend when the town's oldest identity, the thing it was known for before it was known for anything else, still draws people to one place at one time.
Where People Actually Eat Now
If you have searched for restaurants near Deer Trail online, you have probably run into a list that includes places like High Plains Diner and Shooters Bar & Grill. Worth knowing: those two, along with several others that show up in a "near Deer Trail" search, are actually located in Bennett and Byers, a short drive down the corridor rather than inside Deer Trail itself. Search radius rarely respects town lines.
Inside Deer Trail proper, the options are narrower. Del Sol Express has built a following as a reliable stop, including from travelers who found it during a snowstorm on the drive between Denver and points east. Beyond that, the day-to-day food scene in town is thinner than the online listings suggest, which is exactly why a working restaurant and bar at 618 1st Ave matters more here than a similar vacancy would in a larger town with a dozen other options nearby.
The Sign Comes Down Eventually
The Brown Derby closing is not the end of a story about Deer Trail's social life. It is one more turn in a pattern that goes back to Lon Sniff moving his saloon over a county line more than a century ago: the building changes hands, sometimes changes location, sometimes sits empty for a stretch, and the town's actual gathering keeps happening somewhere, whether that is a library inside a school, an arena that fills up once a year, or a diner counter with a regular crowd. The sign on First Avenue will probably come down eventually. Until it does, the town has already shown it knows how to gather without it.
If you're weighing what a home in a town like this actually means day to day, The Lybarger Team at RE/MAX Full House has spent decades getting to know Deer Trail and the rest of the eastern I-70 corridor block by block. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer about what's really happening on the ground here, no matter what stage of the process you're in.
