Ghost Towns of Southern Colorado

Of all the Colorado Fuel & Iron company towns in this corridor, Cokedale is the only one that has not been entirely swallowed. It sits along the Purgatoire River on Colorado Highway 12 — the Highway of Legends — and it retains enough original structure to qualify as a National Historic District. The coke ovens are the main event: a row of approximately one hundred beehive ovens built into the hillside, their arched mouths now sealed and weathered, still standing in formation along the river bank. They processed coal into metallurgical coke for the CF&I steel works in Pueblo. At peak operation in the 1910s and 1920s, the ovens burned continuously.

The town had a school, a company store, a boardinghouse, and row housing for workers — primarily Italian and Slavic immigrants recruited directly from Eastern Europe by CF&I labor agents. The population reached somewhere between 800 and 1,200 at its height, though exact records are difficult to establish since CF&I kept their own counts and the census enumerators found the camps hard to navigate. The mines closed incrementally through the 1940s as demand for metallurgical coke shifted and mechanization reduced the labor requirement.

Today a small number of full-time residents remain. The coke ovens are accessible from the highway. Several original stone and brick structures survive in varying states of repair. The Cokedale Town Hall, a modest stone building, still stands. This is the most visitable of the CF&I ghost town sites and the only one that gives a meaningful physical sense of what the company town system looked like from the inside.

On April 27, 1917, an explosion tore through the CF&I mine at Hastings and killed 121 men. It remains one of the worst mine disasters in Colorado history. The cause was never conclusively established — investigators cited a blown-out shot igniting accumulated coal dust, though the mine's ventilation records, reviewed afterward, suggested the dust accumulation had been a known problem for some time before the event.

The town itself had been a functioning CF&I camp since around 1889 — a typical arrangement of company housing, a company store, and the mine infrastructure above. After 1917, operations resumed under different management, but the town never recovered its prior population. By the 1940s, Hastings was effectively finished. The structures came down or collapsed. The mine sealed.

What remains is the cemetery on the hillside above the old townsite. The graves include many of the 1917 victims. Surnames carved into the markers trace the immigration routes CF&I used to fill these mines: Italian, Greek, Slovenian, Austrian, Mexican, and American-born names in uneven proportion. The cemetery is on private land but has historically been accessible to families of the buried and to researchers. The archive recommends confirming access before attempting a visit.

Tercio was CF&I's showpiece camp — the one they brought visitors to see, the one that appeared in company publications as evidence of corporate benevolence toward its workers. Situated in the Purgatoire River valley roughly twenty miles southwest of Trinidad, it had better housing than most camps, a large company store, recreational facilities, and a substantial residence for the mine superintendent that employees called the Castle. The name was not entirely ironic: the building was a stone and frame Victorian structure of unusual ambition for a coal camp, with turret details and a wraparound porch that faced the canyon.

The mine at Tercio operated under the Colorado Fuel & Iron banner from the late 1800s through the early decades of the twentieth century. Like every camp in this corridor, it was the site of labor tension preceding and during the 1913–14 coalfield strike. Workers at Tercio walked out along with those at Ludlow, Starkville, Berwind, and the other CF&I properties. The company responded as it did everywhere: eviction from company housing, imported strikebreakers, and, eventually, the Colorado National Guard.

The mine closed, the town was abandoned, and most structures deteriorated or were demolished. The Castle and other substantial buildings did not survive intact. What remains at the Tercio site today consists primarily of foundation outlines, collapsed stone walls, and the topographic evidence of what was once a town of several hundred people. Access is private. The archive has reviewed county plat records but cannot confirm current ownership or access arrangements.

Starkville sat south of Trinidad along the road toward Raton, New Mexico. It was a smaller CF&I operation, overshadowed in output and in historical memory by the larger camps to the north and west. The mine ran intermittently from the 1880s through the early twentieth century. The workers there participated in the 1913–14 strike. After the coalfield war ended and the labor situation was suppressed, Starkville continued operating under reduced expectations until the economics of coal extraction in this part of the state made it unviable.

Today the Starkville site has nothing standing of consequence. A road passes through what was the townsite. Occasionally, surface debris consistent with early twentieth-century habitation appears after erosion cycles, but the site does not reward a visit except for those with specific research interests. The archive includes it here because its absence is itself informative: this is what happens to a CF&I town when there is no remaining structure, no remaining community, and no particular historical event to anchor public memory.

Ludlow is not a ghost town in the traditional sense — it never had the footprint to become one. It was a tent colony established by striking miners and their families after CF&I evicted them from company housing in September 1913. On April 20, 1914, the Colorado National Guard attacked the colony. Nineteen people were killed, including eleven children and two women who died in a pit beneath one of the tents, likely asphyxiated when the tent burned over them.

The United Mine Workers of America maintains a monument at the site. There is a small building housing historical photographs and documents. The monument itself is a stone obelisk with the names of the dead. The pit where the children were found is marked. The site is open to visitors and is one of the few places in this region where the physical location and the historical event can be experienced in direct relation to each other.

The archive holds a first-person account from a survivor of the colony — a woman who was eleven years old on April 20, 1914. Her account was collected in 1944 and never published. We also hold a militiaman's letter from the Beaver Creek engagement of 1885, an earlier episode of the same long conflict between capital and labor that concluded at Ludlow.

Morley occupies a narrow valley just north of Raton Pass, visible from Interstate 25 if you know where to look — a line of collapsed stone walls running along the hillside east of the highway. It was a CF&I operation serving the pass-area mines, and like Tercio and Hastings it drew on immigrant labor recruited from Southern and Eastern Europe. The town reached a population of perhaps 500 at its peak and declined steadily after the 1920s as the pass-area mines played out.

The ruins are on private land. Travelers on I-25 get a passing view of the stone outlines without stopping. The archive has not been able to establish a current contact for land access inquiries. We note Morley here because it is among the most visually evident of the surviving ruins, even if "surviving" is generous for walls that are largely collapsed.