Trinidad, Colorado

Trinidad grew up as a crossroads. It was established in 1861 in far southern Colorado, at the foot of Raton Pass, on the Santa Fe Trail — the last major stop on the Colorado side before wagons climbed the pass into New Mexico. That position, where the plains meet the mountains along the Purgatoire River, made it a natural gathering point, and the town became the seat of Las Animas County when the county was organized in 1866. By the late 1860s roughly 1,200 people lived there, and the town settled in as the trade and government center for a wide stretch of country that had, for generations before, been ranched and traveled by Hispano families whose roots ran south into New Mexico.

What made Trinidad boom was coal. Beginning in the 1870s, the hills around town proved rich in coal, and Trinidad grew into the capital of southern Colorado's coal-producing region, prospering from the late 1870s into the 1910s. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad reached town and hauled the coal out, and the money built the brick-and-adobe downtown that still stands — including cattle baron Frank Bloom's elaborate 1882 Second Empire mansion on Main Street. It was also hard, dangerous work: the coalfields around Trinidad were the setting for bitter labor conflict, culminating in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, when National Guard troops attacked a striking miners' tent colony about twelve miles north of town.