Huerfano County Courthouse and Jail

This sandstone courthouse in Walsenburg has anchored Huerfano County since nineteen oh four. The county itself was created in eighteen sixty-one, and its seat wandered through three locations, from Autobees Plaza to Badito, and finally to Walsenburg in eighteen seventy-four, before the county built a permanent home. Pueblo architect C.

A. Henderson designed it in the Romanesque Revival style, with rough-faced local stone, a four-story bell tower, and minarets along the roofline. The thirty-five-thousand-dollar building rose during the coal boom, when railroads and mine camps were reshaping southern Colorado.

The jail earned its own history: labor agitator Mother Jones was held here during the nineteen thirteen coal strike. Today the Walsenburg Mining Museum, housed in the old city jail nearby, is a reminder that what built this county, and what tested it, were one and the same thing.