Morley, Colorado Coal Ghost Town

Near the top of Raton Pass, the stone bell tower of a church is one of the last things standing in Morley, a company town that lived and died by coal. The Santa Fe Railroad established a stop here in eighteen seventy-eight and named the place Cima. In nineteen oh six, Colorado Fuel and Iron took over the site and built a full town around a new coal mine, supplying the corporation's steel plant in Pueblo to the north.

At its peak in the nineteen twenties, Morley held over six hundred residents with its own school, post office, and church. The mine produced an average of six hundred tons of coal per day, and by the time it closed it had yielded over eleven million tons. In nineteen fifty-six the mine shut down, and CF and I demolished the town.

The ruins of Saint Aloysius Church, with its Spanish colonial bell tower, still mark where several hundred people once lived a life tied entirely to a seam of coal under Raton Pass.