LAMAR • This is a story about time. The time we get and what we do with it. Our brief time amid deep time that surrounds us — ancient time represented by petrified wood, one might say.

“There’s probably a whole forest under the sand,” Jim Stagner says here on Colorado’s southeast plains.

Which explains his curious, little building on a corner of Main Street.

Jim walks into it now, through the door between tree trunks turned to stone. He’s holding his great-granddaughter’s hand.

“What is this?” asks 3-year-old Eden.

“This is the petrified wood building, honey,” says her mom, Angela.

This is the head-turning landmark said to be one of a kind.

“The only petrified wood filling station in the world,” read Lamar’s newspaper after the building’s 1932 construction.

It’s a storage place for the Stagner family now. But back in the ‘30s, “it was touted as the oldest working gas station in the world,” reads a pamphlet Jim hands out to drivers who can’t help but stop.

What other gas station claims to be 175 million years old? That’s the age according to the sign posted to the fossilized timber.

“Might be a year or two off,” Jim says with a grin.

At 90, he keeps a quick wit and books piled high in his office next door. They are mostly books about history. One chronicles his own history — a brief timeline to jog the memory.

His finger is scarred and grease-stained from a lifetime of hard work, and he runs it now through the years on the page.

“Come to Lamar in ‘61. Started the tire shop in ‘62,” he says.

He started the tire shop inside the petrified wood building. He would expand next door to a much bigger, full-service shop, Stagner Inc., where his sons still work today.

“Built this shop here in ‘74,” Jim says, continuing through the timeline.

Other years show the houses he built mostly with his bare hands. Others show Stagner Inc.’s expansion to small towns across these plains.

The years show a man from humble beginnings forging a legacy for his family to come. Papa, as his grandkids call him, is not one to talk about where he came from and what he’s accomplished.

Angela does the talking for him. She’s one of six grandkids who went on to a bigger city and opportunities beyond economically depressed Lamar.

It all started inside this curious, little building on a corner of Main Street.

“I try to remind him,” Angela says. “He lived in a hole in the ground, and all of his grandkids went on to college and had very successful business careers.”

It’s the story she’s written down: Jim Stagner was born in 1935 in something of a “dugout” in the San Luis Valley. His family had settled in those fields for government work amid the Dust Bowl.

Around that time, some 200 miles to the east, the petrified wood building was gaining national attention.

“Lamar’s Believe-It-Or-Not Filling Station,” read the 1935 Lamar Daily News headline, referring to recognition by “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!”

The petrified wood building had been “under the direction and inspiring genius of W.G. Brown,” the newspaper reported. Brown was a local lumber dealer.

“For years he has dreamed of making some of the wonders of our great western country more available to the thousands of tourists that pass through Lamar,” the paper went on.

What greater wonder than the ancient forest that was said to lie in Lamar’s countryside? (That’s where most reports pinpoint the source of the building material; a later researcher suspected scavenging around farms and ranches.)

The fossilized wood was said to be of sequoia, cypress or cedar. The massive trees were said to have stood with the dinosaurs.

“It is of more than passing interest to realize that these petrified remains are reminiscent of a time when this area was covered by water and silt deep enough that the process of petrification could take place,” read that 1935 article.

Brown’s vision was well underway: The building would be leased to Phillips 66, as the industry aimed to capture an increasingly motorized America with roadside attractions. The building swapped hands over the decades before the 1962 arrival of a well-traveled tire specialist.

Jim Stagner learned the trade in the San Luis Valley, where he had started a family. From Alamosa, he took his wife and kids to a new opportunity in New Mexico.

“He worked himself out of that job,” says son Roger. “The guy had hundreds of tires or whatever, Dad got ‘em all capped, and the owner of the store said, ‘Well, I don’t have any more work for you.’”

Jim worked nonstop like that. So he did inside the petrified wood building.

To everyone else over the years, the building was a great curiosity. To him, “just a place to start a business,” he says with a shrug.

He’d only stop to rest on a sheet of cardboard in the midnight hours, waiting for tires to cure, and then he’d finish them for truckers to get back on the road first thing in the morning. He did some roofing on the side.

“Papa worked so much when (his kids) were little, just to put food on the table,” says Angela, daughter of one of those three kids. “My mom would cry at night, because she didn’t know if Papa would come home.”

He was a big presence at home, always quick with gifts and lessons on faith; he occasionally traveled as a Christian missionary. And he was always quick with humor. He was fun-loving at the shop, too.

“We worked hard and had fun doing it,” says Glen, the younger son working now in the shop that was expanded in 1974. “And he never complained. Even now, he can barely walk, his knees are bone to bone, but he’d still be fixing flats if he could.”

Jim says it often: “It’s been a good life.”

Good for generations of family after him, Angela is quick to remind. And it all started inside this curious, little building on a corner of Main Street.

It catches the young imagination of the next generation now.

“What is this?” asks 3-year-old Eden.

And one day, she will know.