Page 46 - AreaNewsletters "Nov 2021" issue

Did You Know This About...
Tweet Kimball
by Lora Thomas
Douglas County Commissioner and former State Patrol O cer assigned to Castle Rock in the 1980’s
LAST MONTH’S COLUMN focused on the bullet holes in the ceiling and counter at the B & B Café, located at 322 Wilcox. We learned how Town Marshall Raymond Burr Lewis tragically lost his life attempting to arrest a fugitive from Denver who had shot two Denver Policemen three days earlier. The fugitive was 17-year-old Manuel Perez who was successfully arrested by the County Undersheri , tried for the murder of the Town Marshall, sentenced to life in prison but was killed in a knife ght shortly after arriving in Canon City. Click to read it.
and Cherokee Ranch Castle
But first, another “Castle Rock” Trivia Question:
Who is Castle Rock’s Town Manager? (Answer at the end of this article)
T
HIS ISSUE we turn our attentions to “Tweet” Kimball, whose real name was Mildred Montague Genevieve Kimball, but called Tweet because her father, in letters to his expectant wife, would draw a cartoon for the soon-to-be-citizen, whom he always labeled Tweet. And, if Tweet had followed the expected course for her life, she would have been comfortable sitting under magnolias, sipping tea and reading a historical novel.
1938, she married
a diplomat named
Merritt Kirk Ruddock,
the rst of her four
husbands and father
of her two sons,
Karl and Richard.
During her 18 years as Ruddick’s wife, she learned how to entertain in the diplomatic style.
Tweet had always wanted to raise
cattle, and when she decided to divorce Ruddick, she acquired her Cherokee Ranch estate in 1954 when Ruddick told her that, since there wasn’t room on the same side of the Mississippi for the two of them, he would buy her any place she chose in the West. She seized his o er, claiming the ranch’s castle – perfect for displaying her extensive collections of art and antiques – and lived happily without him in Colorado from 1954 until her death in January, 1999.
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Tweet was born in Georgia, while
her West Point father, Col. Richard Huntington Kimball, was commanding o cer at Fort Oglethorpe. Her ancestors in America go back to 1631 on the Kimball side and to 1629 on
the Montague side. She attended a girls’ private school in Chatanooga, Tennessee, followed by prep school in Shipley, Pennsylvania, then two years at nearby Bryn Mawr College, majoring in art history and English literature. In November 2021 • Castle Rock “AreaNewsletters”
CASTLE ROCK HISTORY