Durango Town History

The first known permanent settlements in the Animas Valley appeared nearly 2,000 years ago when Puebloan farmers began to grow plots of corn to supplement the seasonal round. Puebloan farming continued in the valley for several centuries before the move to the mesa tops to the south and west.

Modern settlement of the Animas Valley, after the short-lived Animas City of 1860, began in 1875. Farms spread across the valley floor to feed the floods of prospectors rushing into Baker's Park up the river. In 1877 a second settlement called Animas City, now part of the northern end of Durango, was granted a post office. Animas City grew in anticipation of the arrival of a railroad that would link Denver to Silverton, passing through the young community on its way toward the mining camps in the mountains. The railroad would lend permanence to Animas City.

The builders of the new railroad had ideas of their own. In 1880 they bought land south of Animas City, laid out the town site of Durango, and built a depot, rail yards, and a roundhouse at the southern end of their own new town. Durango gained permanence with the arrival of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad in 1881.

Durango's rapid transition from frontier camp to civilized regional center was due in part to the crusading woman, Caroline Romney, who ran one of its first newspapers, The Durango Record. Mrs. Romney, though ever the lady, never backed down from a fight.

The smelters, casting a pall of black coal smoke across the sky that was seen as a sign of industrial progress, are gone now. The trainloads of ore coming to the Durango smelters or passing through Durango to more distant smelters are things of the past. But unlike her neighbors, Durango's prosperity and future was never tied to a single commodity, whether it be metals, timber, energy, tourism, livestock, or crops. Durango possessed a diverse economy that rode out the economic panics that took such great tolls on single economy towns in the region.

The canyons immediately west of Durango were the source of coal to fuel the town's smelters and the area's railroads. For a decade that coal came down Lightner Creek Canyon in wagon. In 1890, construction of the Rio Grand Southern Railroad began simultaneously in Durango and Ridgway with both sets of crews scheduled to meet in Rico, completing the 162 mile arc between the two towns. From Durango the Rio Grande Southern construction crews headed up Wildcat Canyon toward Hesperus. The coal wagons vanished, rail branches were built to the coal mines, and the coal industry flourished. The roadbed of one of the coal lines is still visible today ascending the slopes of the Twin Buttes one mile west of Durango.

At Hesperus, eleven miles (17.6 km) west of Durango, the valley of the La Plata River cuts through the shallow coal beds which are visible on a hillside just south of the Skyway.

North of Hesperus the mouth of La Plata Canyon can be seen where it opens into the broader valley. That is the site of the mining camp of Mayday, gateway into the mineral districts of the La Plata Mountains, which like the coal mines, benefited by the arrival of the Rio Grande Southern. Mayday was headquarters for Olga Little and her pack animals which carried ore from mountain mines to the railhead there. El Sierra de la Plata, the Silver Mountains, was named by Spaniards long before the coming of the railroad.

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