Rically Jeffco , Milly Roeder

7 0 0 2 , 8 2 e u s s I , 0 2 e m u l IISSTT ORIORICCAALLLLYY o V HH EEFFFFCCOO The Beers Sisters, JJ Page 9 Contents Roscoe, Jeffco’s Popular, Prolific Placer 2 HHIISSTT OROR I ICC by Beth Simmons First Place Winner Writers Award Contest Barbara Crane, A Woman’s Life in 6 20th Century Jefferson County by Pat Jurgens Second Place Winner Writers Award Contest The Beers Sisters (Part 1) 9 by Burdette Weare A Pleasure Ground in the Mountains: 14 Denver’s Mountain Parks and the Opening of Jefferson County by Sally L. White Tales and Trails 21 by Jerry Grunska Hall of Fame 26 The Mountain Area Land Trust 28 by Mike Strunk Olinger Crown Hill Cemetery 33 Marks A Century of Serving Families by Jeanine Spellman National Historic Register of 39 Historic Properties in Jeffco: The Fort Two Historic Buildings Lost in Jefferson County 40 Salter House Elk Creek Fire Station #1 Good Books about Jeffco History 43 JCHC News & Members 44 JCHC Publications Committee Chair, Erlene Hulsey-Lutz Editor of Historically Jeffco , Milly Roeder Published by Jefferson County Historical Commission (JCHC) Volume 20, Issue 28, 2007 ISSN 1532-6047 Cover Photo: The Beers Sisters working in the fields. (Story on page 9). Photo courtesy of Burdette Weare Design & Layout FinePrint, Denver, CO Roscoe: Jeffco’s Popular, Prolific Placer. H RIRICCAALLLLYY JJEEFFFFCCOO Story on page 2. The train stopped at the Roscoe mine workings. Steel pipe and Rosco flume are visible at right. Photo by Harry Buckwalter, 1890s. Courtesy of Colorado Historical Society, CHS-Z7 -1- Elementary water wheel ROSCOE: Jeffco’s Popular Prolific Placer at Roscoe Simmons By Beth Simmons their luck pulling precious gold from the placer Collection First Place Winner Writers Award Contest at “Roscoe.” Roscoe, Jefferson County’s most popular and riving west through Clear Creek Canyon prolific placer, fills a wide valley that Clear Creek along U.S. Highway 6, we cruise beside carved through the Black Hawk fault zone, just Da busy torrent that spills over rapids downstream from a small weathered gold ore through a “wild and most picturesque gateway.” vein sandwiched between layers of Precambrian- We skirt “Tuff Cuss Bend” by driving through aged green schist. Over time, water easily eroded tunnel one. The highway hugs the canyon wall; through the fault zone and released the insoluble tunnel two looms ahead. We pass by historic gold in the narrow vein. The water captured the landmarks Beaver Brook, Hanging Rock, Mother gold and settled it out in the sediments. The gold Grundy, and the Roadmaster. A few miles past sank to the bedrock and was covered by tens of tunnel two the road cuts through a narrow feet of gravel. Such erosion and deposition has alluvial fan once called the “Stone Dam.” Around been going on in the canyon for over 20 million a sharp bend the towering rock walls retreat from years. Looking one thousand feet above the the stream. The canyon flattens into a valley. The present-day stream level, we see a bed of road widens. A large pullout on the north side of Miocene-aged gold-bearing gravel four-hundred the road beckons. feet thick that caps the ridge south of Clear “Let’s stop here!” We pull over and jump out. Creek. We pause to read the Colorado history sign that Roscoe is close to the spot where George tells of the gold rush and railroad in Clear Creek Jackson descended from Elk Park Meadow into Canyon. Then we grab our gold pans and join the canyon in January of 1859 on his legendary the endless parade of argonauts who have plied trek to what is now Idaho Springs. Within -2- months of Jackson’s find at Idaho Springs, miners hydraulically washed gravel from the sides of the soon found this spot nestled in rugged Clear creek bed. From their new deep pit they sent the Creek canyon. When the stream thawed in the gravel to sluices up on the stream bank through a spring, it provided water for the argonauts. “Ludlum sand elevator.” The miners erected small water wheels to lift The water for the hydraulic hoses and sand water from a pit into wooden sluice boxes and to elevators came from two miles west of Stone power other mining equipment. Sluice boxes, Dam near Roscoe Station. There the company rocker boxes, and long and short “toms,” lined constructed an 800 foot long intake flume, 6 feet with burlap and carpet, caught the gold as it fell wide and 4 feet deep. This short flume funneled out of the water. Arthur Lakes, early professor of water into a sand-box or “penstock.” From there, geology at Colorado School of Mines, reported a huge wooden “Allen Stave Pipe” 4 feet in that some miners easily earned a good day’s wages diameter wrapped with bands of steel, sucked in the early days of this renowned placer. He told water to flow east to the mine site. This of one legendary panful that yielded over 15 gargantuan pipe, buried in a trench that followed ounces in gold! the railroad embankment, passed the old stone Before long, the miners applied lessons learned arch under the railroad at Mayhem Creek, and in California and used pressurized water piped then emerged to follow the road grade to the through hoses to wash gravel off the terraces work site. alongside the stream. Large gold nuggets (one The unique Allen stave pipe took 34 men over weighing over an ounce) laid on the bedrock a month to install at a cost of $1.50 per foot. As under the gravel. In 1896, Lakes sketched the the pipe descended in elevation along the creek, simple hydraulic operations. The miners told it decreased in diameter, and near the diggings, Lakes they were each producing about $10 to was attached to a 2 foot diameter steel pipe. The $15 daily. Today, steep cut gravel banks exposed steel pipe then was split into many smaller pipes along Clear Creek, particularly west of Roscoe, to provide connections for hydraulic hoses. The testify to those simple methods. water pressure from the pipe could shoot a Then, in the 1890s, a company of Swedish fountain 165 feet high through a 4 inch nozzle! miners devised an elaborate engineering scheme Riffled and undercurrent sluice boxes collected to completely reroute Clear Creek and expose the the gold from the pit. As the miners advanced gold-bearing gravel. At the bend of Clear Creek upstream, they filled the pit behind them with upstream from Roscoe, they laid up a sand bag their refuse, boulders, and heavy gravel. At the and rock embankment to channel the water into east end of the operation, after passing through Looking west a huge half-mile-long flume, 10 feet wide by 6 ½ an elaborate undercurrent gold collection system, along the Roscoe feet deep. The flume carried 32,000 gallons per water was returned to Clear Creek at the Stone Flume into the pit. Arthur Lakes, second and dropped the water on a 1 percent Dam. The detoured waters from the flume September 1895 grade. A cooperative Clear Creek then flowed around the gold mine workings. The flume provided power to turn a Pelton wheel which produced electricity to power railway headlight lanterns to light the workings after dark! In a series of sketches drawn in the fall of 1895, Lakes illustrated the construction of this giant flume. Dart Wantland, following in Lakes’ footsteps as a School of Mines student and then instructor of geology, mapped the site in 1935. He clearly showed the position of the head gate for the old flume and the path of the flume along the south canyon wall. By December 1895, the bedrock was denuded. The target layer of gold nuggets and flakes was ready for plucking. The miners shoveled and swept gold from the stream bottom and then -3- rapidly washed debris downstream over the pole on top of Roscoe Rock, and the flume’s ancient falls. embankment across the creek are clearly visible. Anyone who worked at Roscoe faced boulders. In what was called “the first great Denver Roscoe Rock, the huge monolith at the east end enterprise for the development of Colorado’s of the valley, south of the highway, marks the placer gold,” the second large-scale gold retrieval position of the Stone Dam, an ancient landslide. at Roscoe “handled boulders like peas”! A gold- This monster and other debris stood in the way sucking dredge operated by Humphreys Gold of the railroad in 1872. The railroad constructors Corporation began its march up Clear Creek in simply graded around the huge boulder. Recent 1932 at Roscoe Station. Experiments and core highway builders have filled around it. samples showed that the free gold content of the When the railroad first came through the sands of Roscoe at the surface still averaged 30 canyon, Stone Dam sported a water tower and cents per cubic yard and that the deposit enriched station status. The name Roscoe appears later on with depth. In 1935, a graduate student, Dart an 1897 railway time schedule. Roscoe Station sat Wantland at the Colorado School of Mines where Mayhem Creek flows into Clear Creek on conducted repeated geophysical surveys on the the west end of the placer. Often the train Roscoe placer. Testing a new device, called a passengers got out for their photograph while magnetometer, Wantland successfully guided the waiting for the engine to fill. Humphreys Gold Company to those spots where Placer miners, too, faced those road-blocking the most productive deposits laid and saved them boulders.

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