Skip to main content

In Old Colorado City

March 2023
1min read

As one of a very few living natives of Colorado City, Colorado, I was glad to see the place getting some attention in the July/August issue (“History Happened Here”). But Spencer Penrose did not make his fortune “in the gold refineries at Cripple Creek.” The mines were there, but most of the mills were in Colorado City, and they once constituted its chief raison d’être , “Incorporated into Colorado Springs in 1917,” the author remarks, “it has the feel of a real place that the downtown somehow lacks.” Well, the business section of “Old Colorado City” is now gussied up with phony frontier facades and is full of boutiques and other tourist traps. When I was a boy the City was, for tourists, only a stretch they had to get through on the way from the Springs to Manitou and Pikes Peak. It really had “the feel of a real place” in those days.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "November 1989"

Authored by: Ken Heyman

Occupational tintypes are about as cheap today as when they were made, but they offer a valuable look at working-class America during and just after the Civil War

Authored by: Roger J. Spiller

Walt Whitman said, “The real war will never get in the books.” The critic and writer Paul Fussell feels that the same sanitizing of history that went on after the 1860s has erased the national memory of what World War II was really like.

Authored by: Alexander O. Boulton

The medieval look that swept America a hundred and fifty years ago wasn’t just a matter of nostalgia for pointed archways and crenellated towers; it was also the very model of a modern architectural style

Authored by: The Editors

A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service

Authored by: The Editors

A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright

Authored by: The Editors

The History of Animation

Authored by: The Editors

Recollections by Men and Women of World War II Aviation

Authored by: The Editors

Brick Wall Signs in America

Authored by: Bruce Curtis

A year ago we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the Republic.

Authored by: Richard M. Ketchum

The bombs that fell that Sunday didn’t just knock out some battleships; they roused America into a new age. Here is how the long, unforgettable day unfolded.

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.