Durango: The Company Town That Became a Real Town
Near Durango, Colorado
Durango was not discovered. It was engineered. In September of eighteen eighty, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Company planted the town on the Animas River specifically to smelt ore from the San Juan mines. Engineers laid out streets on a grid, chose the site for its water supply and coal deposits, and incorporated the town in eighteen eighty-one. By eighteen ninety it had more than twenty-seven hundred residents.
The railroad's purpose was commercial and precise: bring ore down from the mountains, process it here, ship the refined metal east. Durango grew around that logic, adding saloons, hotels, banks, and churches in rapid succession. It called itself the smelter city. When the silver crash came in eighteen ninety-three, Durango weathered it, kept going by the railroad and the surrounding farms and ranches. The narrow-gauge railroad to Silverton kept running because the mountains kept producing. Today Durango is a college town and outdoor recreation hub of about twenty thousand people, its Victorian downtown largely intact and the same steam trains still departing from the depot on Main Avenue.
