Colorado Fuel and Iron: The Pittsburgh of the West
Colorado
The Minnequa Steel Works, built by Colorado Fuel and Iron in eighteen eighty-one, made Pueblo the industrial heart of the Rocky Mountain West. At its peak the plant employed ten thousand workers and produced more steel than any facility between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Colorado Fuel and Iron, jointly controlled by John D.
Rockefeller and the Gould family after nineteen oh three, ran not just a factory but an empire: company-owned towns, a company hospital, company schools, a company library system called the Societas. The workers were paid in scrip redeemable only at company stores. This was the world the Ludlow strikers came from.
The Steelworks complex earned National Register status in nineteen eighty-seven. The on-site Steelworks Museum, opened in two thousand seven, preserves the office building and dispensary and tells the story of the men and women who poured the steel that built the American West.
