Dolores Town History

El Rio de Nuestra Senora de las Dolores, the words have a musical ring to them ... The River of Our Lady of Sorrows. The river may have been christened by the Spanish explorer Juan Rivera in 1765, or it may have been named that much earlier by Spaniards coming to trade with the Utes.

Dolores, like Ridgway and Durango, is a town that would never have existed had there never been railroads in the San Juan Country. Settlement of the Dolores River Valley in the vicinity of what was to become the town of Dolores began in the late 1870s. Most of the newcomers were homesteaders who cleared the land for crops and ran small herds of cattle in the nearby forests. In 1878 a cluster of homes, the community of Big Bend, began appearing in the valley bottom near the Escalante knoll where the Dolores River turns sharply northward. Soon there was a general store, a bank, a post office, and a school-all the necessary ingredients for permanence and a prosperous future. But that was not to be.

In 1889 plans were made by Otto Mears for a railroad running through and around the western flanks of the San Juan Mountains from Ridgway in the north to Durango in the south. The railroad would tap the riches accumulating in the booming mountain mining towns of Telluride and Rico and the smaller mining camps between the two towns. The 162 mile (270 km) railroad would, as well, link two segments of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad coming into Durango from the east and into Ouray from the north. The new railroad would be known as the Rio Grande Southern.

Every ton of ore hauled out of the mining camps by pack train was revenue lost to the new railroad. By 1891 more than 3,000 men were working on building the Rio Grande Southern. They worked from both ends toward the middle. They faced formidable engineering challenges. But the entrepreneurial Mears knew what he was doing; he'd been building toll roads and railroads in the San Juan Country for more than two decades when he took on the biggest project of them all, the Rio Grande Southern Railroad. The rails from Durango would enter the Dolores River Valley via Lost Canyon toward Rico. Big Bend was two miles down the Dolores River from the mouth of Lost Canyon.

In 1890 two Big Bend businessmen laid out the town site of Dolores at the mouth of Lost Canyon. The rest of the citizens of Big Bend soon followed. By the time the tracks reached Dolores on Thanksgiving Day, 1891, the community of Big Bend was no more.

Dolores was probably seen by the builders of the Rio Grande Southern as a watering stop along the way to Rico and its riches. And the first two booming years of the railroad's operation hauling thousands of cars of rich ore from the mountain mining camps would have strengthened that conviction. But Dolores would soon contribute more to keeping the Rio Grande Southern in operation for sixty years than any other town on the line.

If the railroad was born of the mining boom of the early 1890s, Dolores was born of the railroad. By the turn of the century, however, Dolores was at the center of a boom of its own. In 1902 two large timber companies built mills near Dolores. The nearest forests of towering Ponderosa pine soon vanished before the saws. The sawmills closed. The history of the Dolores timber boom, however, was far from ended. The vast pine forests on the Glades remained untouched.

In 1924 the New Mexico Lumber Company began building Colorado's largest sawmill four miles down river from Dolores. A company owned railroad linked the new company town, named McPhee, to the Rio Grande Southern Railroad in Dolores. Work began immediately on a railroad which would snake through the Glades and bring logs to the new mill. Lumber production began in 1927. Despite the Great Depression, bankruptcies, ownership changes, mill fires, and World War II, millions of board feet of finished lumber rode the rails up to Dolores to be loaded onto Rio Grande Southern lumber trains headed for Durango and points beyond. The timber harvesting, milling, and company railroad operations employed hundreds of people.

Forests in the San Juan Country take many decades to grow back into harvestable timber. The timber harvests riding the rails into McPhee far outpaced the ability of the forests to renew themselves. Profits dwindled. On January 19, 1948, the big mill at McPhee burned.

Now, entering its second century, the economy of Dolores is still linked to agriculture, but sparkling McPhee Reservoir stretching ten miles down valley from the town limits has made the community into a lakeside recreation center as well. Small firms in Dolores manufacture quality products ranging from cider to backpacking equipment. The commitment of the community to preserving its past is seen in the new depot standing on the site of the old. It was built with volunteer labor and is a reminder that the Rio Grande Southern is gone but not forgotten. Dolores was born of the railroad, and Dolores sustained it for most of six decades.

-Text and Photos, Courtesy of A Historical Touring Guide to the San Juan Skyway