Colorado School of Mines: Where the Earth Gives Up Its Secrets
Near Idaho Springs, Colorado
You are passing the campus of one of the most specialized universities in the world, and one of the most consequential for American energy history.
The Colorado School of Mines was born in the chaos of the eighteen seventies mineral rush. Colorado Territory was throwing up mining camps faster than anyone could regulate them, and the men pulling gold and silver out of the Rockies needed engineers who understood what they were looking at. Episcopal Bishop George Randall had already been trying to build educational institutions in the territory when, in eighteen seventy-four, the territorial government formalized his effort and chartered the Territorial School of Mines in Golden. It was Colorado's first public institution of higher education, established before the state itself existed.
When Colorado achieved statehood in eighteen seventy-six, the school became a state institution. Its campus occupies a sloped bench of land below the Table Mountains in Golden, and for a hundred and fifty years it has done exactly what it was created to do: turn the science of what lies underground into practical knowledge.
The school is the only institution in the world that offers doctoral programs in all five major earth sciences, geology, geological engineering, geophysics, geochemistry, and petroleum engineering. Its alumni have shaped American energy extraction in ways that are difficult to overstate. One graduate is credited as the father of hydraulic fracturing. Another is recognized as the father of the tension leg platform, the technology that made deep-water offshore drilling possible. Herbert Hoover, the thirty-first president of the United States and a mining engineer himself, received an honorary doctorate from the school in nineteen thirty-five.
The town of Golden sits at the mouth of Clear Creek Canyon, and the campus rises along its southern slopes. Coors Brewing has been operating here since eighteen seventy-three, which means Golden has spent a century and a half producing both engineers and beer, often serving the same clientele.
