Lafayette: Mary Miller’s town, the coal mines and the lake

Lafayette began as a farm. In February 1888 Mary Miller “set aside 150 acres of land from her farm” and filed the plat for a town, the City’s own history page records, naming it for her late husband, Lafayette Miller; she filed incorporation papers with the Boulder County court on February 23, 1889, and on April 2 that year residents voted 31 to 28 to incorporate. The state’s census file dates the incorporation to 1890, as does Wikipedia’s infobox (January 6, 1890); the City’s page gives the 1889 vote. Both are given here. This is the short version, from the sources at the foot.

Coal

The same year the town was platted, Joseph P. Simpson found coal east of it: the Simpson Mine, 1888, the City says, and Lafayette “was a major coal town” from the 1860s to the 1930s, its mines supplying fuel along the Front Range. Wikipedia names the Simpson and Spencer as the leading mines of the boom. The houses that came with the mines are the town’s oldest: the Lewis House on East Simpson Street, now the history museum, was built in the 1890s at the Gladstone Mine site northeast of town and moved into Old Town between 1905 and 1908, per the museum’s Wikipedia page, and is on the National Register.

Mary Miller stayed at the center of the town she had made. Born Mary Foote in Geneseo, New York, on August 3, 1843, she paid $3,000 to build the Congregational Church, dedicated May 13, 1893, became a bank president, Wikipedia records, and died November 14, 1921. The town counted 410 people in 1890, 970 in 1900 and 1,892 in 1910, by the census, and then stood still for forty years: 1,815 in 1920, 1,842 in 1930, 2,052 in 1940, 2,090 in 1950.

The coal fields were also a battleground. In the state-wide strike of 1927–28, strikers picketed one of the few mines still working, the Columbine at the company town of Serene, northeast of Lafayette, and on November 21, 1927, state police fired into a crowd of about 500 marchers: six miners died, several of them Lafayette men, and one, Nick Spanudakhis, was buried from the Lafayette graveyard, Wikipedia’s account says. The cemetery itself, on Baseline Road, had been laid out in 1891, and its north side was the potter’s field, where, the historical society’s research found, nearly 200 people, many of them immigrants and people of color, were buried without lasting markers and without entry in the City’s records after a mortuary’s books were lost. The City dedicates a plaque to them this November.

1934: the pool

The City tells one story from the 1930s on its own page. In 1934 Lafayette built a swimming pool with public money and donations from families across town, Latino families among them, and within days a “whites only” sign went up; Council leased the pool to the volunteer fire department so it could run as a “private” one. Rose Lueras and 25 other Latino residents sued under the Fourteenth Amendment. The family was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, and Rose, who had gone to Santa Monica with her daughter Rosabelle to wait out the case, was killed there by a car; Rosabelle, 13, testified in her place. The plaintiffs lost in the district court and at the Colorado Supreme Court, and the City filled in the pool rather than open it. In 2019 Council named the pool at the Bob L. Burger Recreation Center the Rose Lueras Pool, and in 2021 put up a permanent interpretive sign.

Water and land

Lafayette’s water came, and still comes, from the Boulder Creek basin by ditch: the City holds shares in more than a dozen ditch and reservoir companies, and about 80 percent of its drinking water is South Boulder Creek and Boulder Creek water, stored at the Goose Haven complex and the privately owned Baseline Reservoir, of which the City has partly owned the capacity since the 1980s, per its Water Resources page. Waneka Lake, fed from the same creeks, once held George Ira Miller’s electricity plant, “Plant Lake,” the City’s history page says, and is now the town’s park lake.

The suburb

Growth came late and fast. The census counted 2,612 people in 1960, 3,498 in 1970, 8,985 in 1980, 14,548 in 1990, 23,197 in 2000, 24,453 in 2010 and 30,411 in 2020. The historical society was founded in 1976, when Elmo Lewis sold his childhood home to it on the condition that it become a museum “dedicated to the history and coal mining heritage of the town,” and the Lafayette Miners Museum opened there that bicentennial year; it became the Lafayette History Museum in 2022. The City bought the Thomas farm west of Highway 287 in 2002 as buffer land near Waneka Lake and keeps it farmed under lease, and its open space now counts 1,640 acres. The Lewis House, the cemetery, the pool’s name and the Miller plat are what the town kept of the first century; the rest is in the museum.