Colorado Springs, Colorado

Colorado Springs has many older edifices scattered around town, remnants from the opulence of the mining heyday. The Pioneers Museum is one of those in the heart of downtown. Excellently redone with great displays, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the nitty-gritty's of Colorado history.

On the west side of town is Old Colorado City, an area that looks very much as what we might envision "Old Colorado City" should look like. The character and theme of the neighborhood is to show some of the color and opulence of Colorado's mining boom during the Victorian era.

Colorado Springs was founded by General William Palmer in 1871. He bought a huge tract of land just to the east of Colorado City, and intended to create a "high quality resort" community here at the foot of Pike's Peak with the Garden of the Gods nearby. His flagship hotel, the Antlers, opened for business in 1873 and brought in tourists from around the world. A couple years later General Palmer founded the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, an enterprise that tied together a lot of southern Colorado and brought all that business into a thriving Colorado Springs.

In 1891, Winfield Scott Stratton discovered and developed a huge gold strike in the Cripple Creek-Victor area. Much of the ore produced there was carried to Colorado City for processing on Palmer's railroad. Stratton bought land from Palmer and donated it for the Post Office, the Courthouse (which is now the Pioneer Museum) and City Hall. He also built the Mining Exchange building, donated land for parks and funded the Myron Stratton Home for the elderly and for itinerant children (which section is now used for the treatment of severely abused and disturbed children).

Early photos of Colorado Springs show a city laid out with wide streets and a number of large stone buildings (the library, the courthouse, Colorado College and others) built and occupied but sitting in the middle of open and empty prairie: the city's infrastructure was being grandly built in stone before there was a population to support it.

Spencer Penrose is another early mining magnate who left his mark on Colorado Springs. He financed construction of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, the Broadmoor Hotel, the Pikes Peak Highway, Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun, and what became Penrose-St. Francis Health Services.

Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Colorado Springs saw its first military base established at Camp Carson. Then the Colorado Springs Municipal Airport became Peterson Field and was used as a training base for heavy bomber crews during the war. When the war ended, the military started to close down these bases but changed their minds when the Korean conflict began. In 1951, the United States Air Defense Command relocated to Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. In 1954, President Eisenhower chose a site just north of Colorado Springs to build the Air Force Academy. In 1963, NORAD moved into the underground facility built inside Cheyenne Mountain. In the mid-1970s, Ent Air Force Base was decommissioned and became the United States Olympic Training Center. In 1983, Falcon Air Force Base (later renamed Schriever Air Force Base) was commissioned and charged with satellite control and missile defense. The Air Force Space Command is located at nearby Peterson Air Force Base.

Special Attractions

Garden of the Gods

The Garden of the Gods is a city park on the northwest side of town. The big stars in the park are the spires and fins of Dakota sandstone sticking up out of the ground, remnants of the mountain-building action that pushed up the Front Range (and Pikes Peak) about 65,000,000 years ago. This area has been pretty well preserved since the first Europeans arrived in the area: they recognized the grandeur and sacredness of the site and didn't just destroy it in their insatiable thirst for mineral wealth. However, if I turned my camera to the left, there's a mountain side behind the rock formation on the left side of the photo that's a mining legacy left over from the days when almost anything was allowed in terms of ripping the minerals from the ground. In those days, once the minerals were gone, the miners just went away and left their mess behind. The clean-up on that particular mine site has been going on for many years now...