History and culture - Mountains
Downtown Florence is a listed historic district built on coal, oil, and smelting
The Downtown Florence Historic District preserves the commercial main street of a town that boomed on coal, oil, and smelting, and the Florence Pioneer Museum sits in one of its sandstone buildings.
Published June 10, 2026 - Last verified June 11, 2026
A few miles east of Cañon City, the town of Florence has its own listed historic district downtown. It was the commercial center for a region built on coal mining, early oil, and ore smelting, and it saw two boom periods, first in the 1890s and again in the 1910s and 1920s. The main street still shows late-1800s and early-1900s commercial buildings, with stone trim, decorative cornices, and brickwork on the upper stories even where the ground-floor shops have been updated.
That industrial backstory explains why Florence is where it is and why its downtown looks the way it does. The same coal, oil, and smelting economy that drew workers also built the solid brick and stone storefronts you see today.
One of those buildings, the Braden and Griffith Block, is the town’s sandstone landmark and has housed the Florence Pioneer Museum since the 1960s. A museum like this is a good first stop for understanding the area’s mining and oil heritage from a local, archival source rather than secondhand stories.
If you are buying or renovating in the district, it is worth asking how the historic listing affects changes to a building. For the official description, boundaries, and the museum’s background, see History Colorado’s pages for the Florence Historic District and the Braden and Griffith Block.