Lafayette: Coal Town, Mary Miller's Bank, and the Columbine Mine Massacre

The town of Lafayette, Colorado was born in coal dust and shaped by blood, and most people driving past it on their way to Boulder have no idea.

In eighteen eighty-four, coal was discovered on the farm of Mary and Lafayette Miller. Three years later, a miner named John Simpson sank the first shaft on a lease from the Miller land, and by the summer of eighteen eighty-eight the first houses had gone up and a second mine was already operating. Mary Miller platted roughly ninety acres, named the town for her late husband, and became one of the most remarkable figures in Colorado history. When she founded the Lafayette Bank in nineteen hundred, she was elected its president, a distinction that a Denver Post article of the day said made her the only woman known to be a bank president in the United States.

For the next four decades Lafayette was a major coal town. Miners from Wales, England, Italy, and Eastern Europe crowded into company housing and worked shafts that ran hundreds of feet beneath the Boulder County prairie. The work was dangerous and the wages were controlled by the operators. Strikes broke out repeatedly, suppressed each time with what contemporary accounts describe as brutal indifference by the mining companies and by state and local authorities alike.

The defining confrontation came on November twenty-first, nineteen twenty-seven. A strike had been called on October eighteenth across the northern Colorado coal fields. The Columbine Mine, five miles northeast of Lafayette in the camp of Serene, was one of the only operations still running, kept open with about one hundred fifty strikebreakers. On that November morning, five hundred striking miners and their wives marched to the mine gate to make their demands. State police and mine guards opened fire with rifles and pistols; accounts differ on whether machine guns were also used. Six miners were killed. About twenty people were wounded. No guards or officers were ever charged.

A memorial to the Columbine Mine Massacre was dedicated at the Lafayette Cemetery in nineteen eighty-nine. The ghost town of Serene has since been entirely demolished. Lafayette today is a prosperous Front Range suburb, its coal history marked by a small heritage display in city hall and the memory carried by descendants of the miners who built it.