VICTOR — Steve Veatch knew his ancestors settled in the tiny Teller County mining town of Victor, but he didn’t know much else about the community on the south side of Pikes Peak.
So Veatch, a part-time professor at Colorado School of Mines, joined fellow members of the Lake George Gem and Mineral Club to do some digging.
Three hundred hours, $700 and multiple field trips later, Veatch and his club fellows had compiled a historical record of Victor, which a local geologist hails as “the best single source” for detailed information on the town.
Veatch presented the research in July at Victor’s Gold Rush Days. His slide show outlined the history of this town below Pikes Peak on Battle Mountain — noting Victor once had 37 saloons, 29 hotels, 18 grocery stores, 16 doctors and a hospital, and was the fifth-largest city in Colorado.
On a personal note, Veatch discovered that his great-grandfather was a gold miner who moved to Victor in the 1890s and mined the Elkton mine.
His grandmother remembers hearing the miners: Each morning as they set off for work, the Welsh- and British-bred men would sing mining songs handed down from families in Europe.
Veatch also learned that his grandfather grew up in a mining community in Boulder.
“I have mining heritage on both sides,” he said. “I was genetically predisposed to pursue mining interests.”
After the slide show, the group piled into a bus for a field trip to historic mines in the hills above town.
“I think it’s fantastic,” said Laura Moncrief, a genealogist from Divide who came on the tour.
“So much of this gets torn down, thrown away, because there was a generation before mine that were more interested in making money and surviving,” she said. “We’re lucky that we have some resources and are interested in this type of thing.”
The driving tour looped around the American Eagles Scenic Overlook — where a historic mining headframe and other century-old buildings tell Victor’s mining history — and past modern, open-pit cyanide mining operations to several of the region’s deserted mines, including the Cresson, Vindicator and Independence.
Veatch shared geology and history tidbits at each stop, often enlisting the help of 84-year-old Ed Hunter, a Victor resident who has been in the mining industry since graduating from Colorado School of Mines after World War II.
“To be able to see it like this is just amazing,” Hunter said as he looked at the contrast between buildings from the old Vindicator mine and the modern mining operation. “I started out with mine cars underground. To go to a 300-ton truck — my god.”
Victor is the second town Veatch and his team have profiled. The team’s first project started two years ago, when a resident of Guffey asked Veatch to prepare a slide show on the geology of the unincorporated Park County town. He agreed and recruited fellow club members to help.
The team is now finishing its third profile, this time examining Alma, a town of about 200 people near Fairplay.
Again, team members are making discoveries: From newspaper archives, they uncovered the forgotten town of Timberline, which existed in the late 19th century but isn’t recorded in any history books, Veatch said.
They will present the Alma research in late September at Alma Community Church and at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
