Incorrect historical information gets imbedded into a town’s history in odd and sometimes expensive ways.
Fake History: The errant roundabout
New Lafayette history book: Lost Lafayette, Colorado
Lost Lafayette, Colorado is available now and is an update to Doug Conarroe’s “80026” coffee table book and contains new chapters on Lafayette’s dark decade dominated by the Ku Klux Klan. There’s also new details about Lafayette’s irrigation and water history. The well-researched book is Lafayette’s complete history from the 1820s through the 1930s. Find it at Arcadia Press.
Local vendors for Arcadia Books include Walgreen’s and Jax Farm and Ranch.
The Millers and Lafayette’s Ku Klux Klan
History can sometimes be very messy, with dark chapters that take decades to sort out. Lafayette’s history is no exception.
Recent discoveries related to the Ku Klux Klan activities of town founder Mary Miller’s descendants have so sullied her legacy — and the Miller name — to the point that it should not be used to recognize anything — a street, a neighborhood or a housing development.
Lafayette coal mine locations
Lafayette area coal mine fatalities, 1887-1956
One of the most hazardous vocations on record, early coal mining was nothing more than men with picks undercutting hundreds of feet of rock to extract a narrow seam of coal. The room-and-pillar system for removing coal was highly productive, but very dangerous. Some coal was left in place to support the rock layers, and thousands of wood timbers were used to brace the rock above the voids so that the coal could be loaded. Dislodging the coal involved a miner bringing his own keg of black powder into the mine, which when packed into drilled holes could detonate prematurely or not at all. Miners worked separate rooms sometimes miles from the main shaft, which meant little supervision. Add to this the pay-per-ton wages wherein a miner often overlooked his own safety so that as much coal as possible could be loaded.
What could possibly go wrong?
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