Editor’s note: This July, as Colorado Springs gears up for its 150th birthday on the 31st, The Gazette has prepared a series of articles on the history of our city. Check back for fascinating glimpses into the people and events that have shaped Colorado Springs into the landmark it is today.
It was a frontier town of families, churches and blue-collar workers.
But Colorado City held secrets in the tunnels underfoot.
In the late 1800s, when alcohol sales were banned in Brig. Gen. William Palmer’s neighboring Colorado Springs, the merchants of Colorado City quenched the region’s thirst and more, digging underground passages that may have been used for discreet entry into some of the town’s more than two dozen saloons, brothels and gaming parlors.
This way, men with names to protect, including from Palmer’s “city of millionaires,” could visit the unsavory district south of Colorado Avenue with their reputations intact.
“There were always two sides to people, and there were always two sides to Colorado City,” said Sharon Swint of the Old Colorado City Historical Society. The group of citizen historians has spent decades documenting the area’s red-light district excesses — as well as Colorado City’s “other side,” as a bustling stop on the Midland Railroad, an affordable home for working-class families and a regional center for processing gold and silver ore mined in Cripple Creek.
Established in 1859 as a gold rush supply depot at the base of Ute Pass, Colorado City became part of Colorado Springs’ west side in 1917.
The move came four years after it had shut down its red-light district, casting out brothels and bars and taming its scandalous reputation — much to the delight of the preachers on Pikes Peak Avenue, who inveighed against them from the pulpit.
“There were fiery, fiery sermons against all the sin and vice we had in this town,” said Leo Knudson, also of the neighborhood historical society. “The town was really split between the wets and the drys,” he added, referring to the clash that resulted in the 1913 vote to prohibit alcohol.
Reminders of the past are scattered through the area, which spans Colorado Avenue from 20th Street to 32nd Street, including Fountain Creek and the Midland Railroad corridor south of Cimarron Street/Highway 24.
Some of the brick-face buildings in Old Colorado City’s tourist district date to its gold-rush boom days, and 19th century homes fill the tree-shrouded streets surrounding it.
Each comes freighted with stories, some of them only partly true.
A log cabin still on display in Bancroft Park, at West Colorado Avenue and 24th Street, was for years billed as the “First State Capitol Building,” but according to an exhibit at the Pioneers Museum, the claim is apocryphal, no matter how much it’s been repeated.
Even Colorado City’s much-discussed tunnels are steeped in uncertainty.
For “Tunnel Tales of Old Colorado City,” a book published by the historical society, Swint and fellow authors Knudson and Suzanne Schorsch show pictures from cellars and musty basements beneath Old Colorado City’s main drag documenting archways and stonework from what might have been filled-in passageways.
The tunnels apparently ran from within businesses on the north side of Colorado Avenue to the south side or beyond. The city’s taverns were mainly on the south side of Colorado Avenue and the bordellos were largely confined to Cucharras Street.
The authors of “Tunnel Tales” acknowledge that some of what they documented could have been for other purposes, and they report that evidence for other possible tunnels appears thin.
But at one time at least, visitors to the former Windsor Saloon, in the 2500 block of West Colorado Avenue, could descend a narrow staircase in a backroom to a dirt-floored basement and find the start of an elaborate underground corridor, the book reports.
“The tunnel is in the northwest corner and is perhaps the best one still surviving,” according to “Tunnel Tales.” “There is an arched entrance, rock sides and wooden finished ceiling. It has, however, been filled in after five feet.”
None of the tunnels are available to the public, and in some cases they have been sealed off with drywall or made otherwise inaccessible, Swint said.
The red-light district was an important source of revenue for Colorado City, which collected fines and fees the way Manitou Springs banks tax revenue from recreational marijuana sales, which are barred in Colorado Springs.
“During our heyday in 1880s and early 1900s, Colorado City had almost 30 saloons on south side of Colorado Avenue open 24/7,” Knudson said. “You could walk out back door, cross the alley and we had two blocks of brothels.”
In the late 1890s, saloon operators posted a $2,000 bond and paid an annual $600 license fee. Boarding houses — or brothels — paid the city based on their number of “boarders.” They also paid fines to the city for operating on Sundays and a variety of other civil violations.
Some of the bars were just large enough for a few drinkers to belly up, while others came with amenities fit for gentlemen from Palmer’s oasis east of Fountain Creek. Bordellos likewise varied in quality and price. A few of their operators were prominent figures in town, such as Laura Bell McDaniel, known as the “queen of the tenderloin.” Her pet elk, Thunder and Buttons, inspired the name of a popular Old Colorado City tavern.
The reality of life in the city’s red-light district often fell short of any Old West romance. Knudson described deplorable conditions for some of the women who worked there.
After the prohibition vote in 1913, some of the saloon and bordello operators tried to establish the nearby town of Ramona, but the effort went bust. Ramona was located at Uintah Avenue and 24th Street, near Thorndale Park.
Another totem of Colorado City’s past is the 19-story smokestack that that looms on a hill overlooking Highway 24.
Starting in 1908, the stone sentinel belched smoke as part of Golden Cycle Mill, one of four great mills that refined gold and silver ore hauled from Cripple Creek via the railroad.
The Golden Cycle Mill was the last of them to close in 1949, leaving 4 million tons of gold and silver ore tailings, the mineral-rich rock dust left over from the extraction process. Gold Hill Mesa, the housing development, sits in the shadow of the old smokestack on land previously occupied by the mill, according to its website.
The city can credit the same group of residents who formed the neighborhood historical society with helping to save some of its historic buildings.
One of them, Dave Hughes, was driven by the 1976 Centennial celebration to do more to preserve Colorado City’s history.
In the late 1970s, he and his partners pushed to establish a special maintenance district aimed at saving historic properties that had been slated for demolition. The effort resulted in $10 million in loans over a seven-year period for people willing to move in and set up new businesses, helping to revitalize the area.
“The city took the underlying risk, with federal money,” Hughes told The Gazette in 2000. “Not a nickel of local tax money went into it.”
Hughes, a longtime treasurer for the Old Colorado City Historical Society, also worked at the group’s history museum, housed at the former First Baptist Church, 1 S. 24th St.
He has stepped back from volunteer work because of frail health, a departure underscored by recent deaths among the group’s founders. Already strapped by the pandemic, they’ve had a hard time recruiting new people to put in work.
“It’s only people like Leo who will still dig into things,” Swint said, referring to Knudson, 83.
This content was originally published here.
