Argo Tunnel
Near Idaho Springs, Colorado
By the eighteen nineties the gold mines above Idaho Springs faced a common problem: water. The deeper miners dug, the more groundwater flooded the tunnels, making extraction expensive and eventually impossible. A New York lawyer named Samuel Newhouse had a solution.
In eighteen ninety-three he filed articles of incorporation for the Argo Mining, Drainage, Transportation and Tunnel Company, backed by British investors and a hundred thousand dollars in capital. Workers began boring in September of that year through solid mountain rock, and the tunnel took seventeen years to complete. When it finally opened in nineteen ten it stretched over four miles from Central City to Idaho Springs, making it the longest drainage tunnel in the Central City and Idaho Springs mining district.
It drained the mines above and carried the ore directly to the Argo Mill below.
