The Sleeping Coal Towns of Huerfano County

You're passing through a landscape where the built environment tells a story of boom, bust, and stubborn survival. This is Huerfano County, where the architecture reads like a ledger of Colorado's coal mining past. Look around and you'll see those characteristic company town remnants: modest wood-frame houses with false fronts, utilitarian brick buildings from the nineteen-tens and twenties, and the occasional stone foundation where a larger structure once stood.

The building stock here is remarkably honest. Unlike the grand Victorian architecture of Colorado's silver towns, these structures were built for function, not show. You'll see simple gable roofs designed to shed snow, wooden siding that's weathered to silver-gray, and windows placed for cross-ventilation in those sweltering summer months underground miners craved fresh air. The few brick buildings that remain typically housed banks or company stores, their Romanesque arches and corbelled brickwork representing the only architectural ambition most of these towns could afford.

Many structures incorporate local materials: sandstone foundations quarried from nearby outcrops, and occasionally you'll spot buildings made entirely of the region's tan and red stone. The WPA left its mark here too, in the form of a few Depression-era public buildings with that distinctive stripped-down classicism and quality stonework that puts modern construction to shame.

Now, about Walsen Camp, just a few miles from where you're traveling. It was built in nineteen-thirteen by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and at its peak housed over fifteen hundred people. The company constructed everything: houses, a school, a hospital, even an opera house. Yes, an opera house, way out here in coal country. It was CF and I's attempt at enlightened capitalism, showing they could provide culture along with paycheck.

But here's the thing: that opera house and nearly every other building in Walsen Camp was also a tool of control. When the great coal strike erupted in nineteen-thirteen, company guards turned the town into a fortress. And when the mines finally closed for good in the nineteen-fifties, CF and I systematically demolished almost everything, erasing entire streets to avoid property taxes. Today, you'd barely know a town of that size ever existed. Just foundations, fragments of sidewalks, and the ghosts of a thousand daily commutes that ended at the pithead.

Keep your eyes open as you drive north. What's missing tells as much story as what remains.