Durango: The Railroad Town That Ate Its Neighbor
Near Durango, Colorado
In eighteen eighty, the town of Animas City sat two miles north of a bend in the Animas River and had been there long enough to consider itself established. It had a post office, businesses, and the optimism of a frontier settlement that believed the Denver and Rio Grande Railway would route through it. The railroad had other plans.
When Animas City declined to donate land for a station and rail yard, the Denver and Rio Grande simply founded its own town two miles south. The company filed the plat for Durango in September eighteen eighty and began selling lots. Within a year the railroad had arrived, and Durango had a smelter, hotels, banks, and enough commercial traffic to make Animas City irrelevant. The rival town held on for a few years and then dissolved, its residents drifting south toward the action.
The name came from Durango, Mexico, which the railroad's founders found geographically suggestive. The geography was also the point. Durango sat at the base of the San Juan Mountains, positioned to receive silver and gold ore from the mines above Silverton and process it in smelters on the valley floor. The railroad reached Silverton in July eighteen eighty-two, completing a forty-five mile corridor through the Animas Canyon that remains one of the most technically impressive pieces of mountain railroading in the country.
The Strater Hotel opened in eighteen eighty-seven, built by Cleveland pharmacist Henry Strater with hundreds of thousands of handmade red bricks and a conviction that the mining boom would make a fine hotel viable. He was right in the short term. The Strater is still operating on Main Avenue, its Victorian Walnut antique collection intact, a building that outlasted the silver market, the smelters, and the industry that built it.
What remains of the original economy is largely the railroad itself, now the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. The city Durango became, a regional commercial center in the Four Corners area, is a different thing from the company town the Denver and Rio Grande built. But the bones are the same: a river, a canyon, and the logic of metal coming down from the mountains.
