Learning more Colorado history

We've been coming up to the Monarch area for so many years, we've picked up a lot of local history. But the great thing about history is that you can always learn some more!

The picture above shows our little town of Garfield (whose population, as of the 2010 Census, was all of 15) back in its boom days. (The picture was taken in 1886.) When, we've heard, there were as many as 250 buildings in the town!*

You might notice something curious in the old photo: the rather striking lack of trees. For comparison, check out this 1940 picture that I found in the Denver Public Library's digital collection (the red lines in both photos point to the Schoolhouse):

Back in the boom times, a lot of wood was needed for building cabins and for heating them. Thus, the denuded slopes. Sadly, it's possible that the area's glory days are somewhat to blame for the devastation currently being visited upon the region's lovely pines by the pine beetles.

Our Colorado friends assert that, when the slopes were harvested bare, the lodgepole pines were the first to recolonize, and they are particularly susceptible to the little beasties. Now, whole swaths of mountainsides in some areas are all dead trees. They've even had to start closing trails because of the danger of falling limbs and trunks.

The reason for the big boom, of course, was all the mining in the area, and in between all our domestic work, we were able to take a short break and get intimate with this history by taking a short drive up the mountain to the old Garfield Mine.

We had rather hoped that our little valley might be spared the pine beetle scourge, being high enough and, we hoped, cold enough to keep the beetles at bay. But we've started seeing some of the spectacularly dead trees here, too. Here's a cluster seen from the mine:

But, sad as some of the consequences of the history might be, it's still pretty fascinating to learn about.

And what's left behind has its own kind of beauty. Take a look at the wonderfully-weathered wood making up part of this old mine building, beautiful even if you have to think of the bare slopes when you admire its patina:


The Garfield mine was worked more recently than the 1880's, too, as evidenced by some of the structures at the site. On the left is a picture of Henry in one of the more recent-looking tunnels.

The beams are rusty, true, but they're metal, not wood, and the walls don't look nearly as antique as those in some of the other tunnels and buildings we [very carefully] examined. For example, here I am in the doorway of a small hut we speculated might have been a smokehouse:

Evidence of even more recent activity is obvious just up the road, where you can see the piles of marble that I commented on during our trip two years ago. On the right you can see the way the marble pile looks from down the road at the Garfield Mine.

You can also see, in the further distance, a hint of what currently makes for annual little booms in the Colorado economy...skiing! The Monarch Ski Area, which I've written about often, is just up the road, and is indicated by the red line in this photo. I was rather taken by this juxtaposition of the marks on the landscape from both old and new Colorado wealth:

We were thankful to learn more about this beautiful and interesting area from the Colorado friends that visited us there, as well as a knowledgeable neighbor who loaned me some great books detailing the county's history.

For example, I never knew that there used to be another large-ish town up the highway, where the Madonna Mine is still somewhat operational today. It was called "Monarch," in fact, but it's just completely vanished. All that's left are a couple of mine buildings now, but in the late 1800's there used to be a hotel, a school, all kinds of marks of civilization.

On the left is a photo of this mine (which is just downhill from the ski area) from the 1940's. (Thanks again to the Denver Public Library's digital collection.) It looks pretty much the same today, except for even more of the side of the mountain is gone—no trace of the town. According to this useful website, most of the buildings were covered in a snow slide in 1904, and since the area's silver economy had already gone bust, they didn't rebuild.

I plan to scour the internet to find copies of the books our neighbor had to buy for myself (to supplement google ). When I've studied them more closely, I'll probably have some interesting follow-up tidbits to share with you about this wonderful area.

Because, no matter how much you learn about the history of a place, you can always learn more!

I'll close with another example of this maxim and a shot of a conscious memorial—as opposed to a left-behind artifact—to Colorado's mining past. I took the photo below in Trinidad, a scenic little town just over the CO-NM border on IH-25, where we stopped for some ice cream. It has a rich mining history, too, which I didn't realize. And probably many more interesting stories, just waiting to be re-discovered.

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*Being a government information librarian by trade, I'm a little steamed that I can't seem to find an official population figure for Garfield during this boom period. But I'm still working on it! I will edit the post when I can give a definite number here.