
Francis Marion Light founded Light and Sons Western Wear (1905), 826–830 Lincoln Avenue, and made it the best-known emporium in northwestern Colorado. Light's Burma Shave–style mustard yellow highway signs extend even into northeastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming. A Missouri farmer and schoolteacher, Light arrived in Steamboat Springs with a wife, seven children, and a dog, who all helped staff the store. The Lights' two-story clapboard house complete with Tuscan porch posts may have been mail ordered from Sears, Roebuck. It sits on a hill as the centerpiece of the family ranch amid some surviving outbuildings in what is now the Deerfoot Artspark subdivision. A son, Wayne Light, author of My First Eighty-One Years, lived in the house after his father's death and sold off much of the surrounding acreage.