The Underhill Museum and the Name Idaho

On Miner Street stands a modest building that was once the home and office of James Underhill, a mining engineer who shaped this town in a very literal way. Underhill arrived in eighteen ninety seven, a Harvard graduate who went on to earn a doctorate and to teach mining for decades at the Colorado School of Mines. He was a United States deputy mineral surveyor, and many of the very street plats and mining claims of Idaho Springs were laid out by his own hand.

In nineteen twelve he built this house with two separate front doors, one for business callers and one for social visits. His widow later deeded it to the town as a museum, and it now belongs to the local historical society. The town's own name carries a fine twist that Underhill's surveying could never have fixed.

In the early eighteen sixties a congressional committee liked the name Idaho for a new territory here, believing it was a Native American word meaning gem of the mountains. It was not. The name was probably invented, and once Congress realized that, it chose Colorado Territory instead.

But the name had already stuck to this town before anyone realized it was made up, and to this day the true origin of the word Idaho remains genuinely unknown.