Download our Logo
Vol. 31:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2003
The Colorado Fuel and Iron Archives
by Jonathan Rees
The Bessemer Historical Society (BHS) of Pueblo, Colorado, is a nonprofit organization made up of local residents and civic leaders. The Society's mission is to preserve and display the written and physical heritage of the company and its employees. BHS is the owner of the Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) archives, an estimated 21,500-linear-foot collection of material relating to Pueblo's onetime largest employer.
In its heyday, CF&I owned mines across Colorado and in four other Western states. It was once the largest private employer and landowner in Colorado. It also operated the only major steelworks west of the Mississippi.
CF&I owned subsidiaries across the United States. There are records in the collection from firms ranging from California to Massachusetts. CF&I fell on hard times in the late 20th century. The last of the company's mines closed in the early 1980s, and CF&I went bankrupt in 1990.
When Rocky Mountain Steel Mills (a subsidiary of Oregon Steel of Portland, Oregon) purchased the company assets in 1993, ownership of CF&I's records was included. These records were scattered through a group of nearly abandoned buildings just outside the mill complex. The collection was (and to a great extent still is) in much the same condition that CF&I left it, largely unorganized and unexplored. Nevertheless, it is still possible to discuss the collection's general contents and overall significance.
The collection dates back to the company's origins in the 1870s. It includes papers, books, photographs, films, and some steelmaking artifacts and ephemera. The subjects covered by the collection are equally varied. There are geological records from abandoned mines that might prove useful to modern mining concerns looking for new wealth, photographs from all parts of Colorado, and personnel records from every part of the business dating back to the late 19th century. The records of the firm's land holdings date back even earlier-they describe what certain plots were like before the company even existed.
The CF&I Administration Building, designed by Denver architect Frederick Sterner, was built in 1901. Photograph courtesy of the author.
The historical significance of the CF&I collection derives in part from its size. Most businesses do not open their archives to scholars because of the legal issues that raises. Therefore, business historians tend to study the same few companies over and over again because these are the only ones for which they can find good sources. The CF&I archives will give these historians much more to write about. There are excellent opportunities for groundbreaking research in nearly every section of the collection.
The importance of the archives is also a function of CF&I's significance to the American economy. For much of its history, CF&I operated the only steelworks west of the Mississippi River. According to CF&I historian H. Lee Scamehorn, these mines produced 182,941,733 tons of fuel between 1872 and 1982. The company burned some of this coal in its blast furnaces, but more of it was sold to households all across the West. CF&I products literally built the West.
In order to keep its mines running, the company built entire towns to house its workers. The company stores that CF&I owned through its Colorado Supply Company subsidiary were responsible for most of the commercial activity in these communities. The records of these company stores are one of the treasures of the collection. They offer an unparalleled opportunity to discover exactly how miners and their families lived.
CF&I is also important because of its role in the infamous Ludlow Massacre of 1914. On April 20, 1914, a Colorado National Guard contingent killed 20 innocent men, women, and children in a camp of striking miners and their families. Most of the victims worked for or were family members of CF&I employees. Although this event is famous for being one of the most violent events in American labor history, that is not the only reason that it is historically significant.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was the largest stockholder in CF&I at the time of the massacre. Because of the public embarrassment of having his family connected to this tragedy, he hired a man named Mackenzie King to draw up an employee representation plan to give workers a voice in the management of the mill and the mines. Known as the "Rockefeller Plan," this arrangement was the first and most influential such organization in American history. The plan is also significant because King would go on to become the long-serving Prime Minister of Canada.
Up to now, BHS has raised over $2 million in support of its activities. Much of this money has been used to purchase the buildings where the collection will be housed, which are an annex to the original administration building erected in 1920. Although BHS is a grassroots organization, grants from the State of Colorado and the United States Government have proved pivotal in this effort.
In August 2001, BHS received a $35,700 grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission to pay for the duplication of company microfilm. CF&I began to reproduce important historical records on microfilm in 1945, just as this technology was becoming available commercially. It continued to do so until approximately 1960. All told, there are 4,000 rolls in the collection. As logic dictates, the kinds of records that a firm would bother to microfilm are of particular historical significance. They include production reports and payrolls as well as ledgers detailing costs from all CF&I facilities.
When the company microfilm was first discovered, threats from exposure to water from overheated pipes and from the complete lack of environmental controls in the storage room were obvious. When BHS learned from former employees that the original copies of the documents were thrown out after microfilming, it knew it had to act fast.
The BHS NHPRC grant is supporting the duplication of approximately 1,000 of the microfilm rolls. Following standard archival practice, a contractor is making two copies of each reel. The first is on diazo stock for reference use by archives patrons. The second is on silver nitrate stock, and will be kept in storage except for making diazo replacement copies when necessary. The contractor is also replacing all the original cardboard boxes with acid-free material so as to minimize damage to the stored reels. Nevertheless, BHS is saving the original boxes and has assigned each roll of film an independent number in order to track and identify the microfilm. The contractor is also carefully indexing the copied rolls.
Despite the uniqueness and significance of the archives, saving the CF&I collection is only one part of the BHS mission. In order to honor the legacy of CF&I and its employees, BHS is planning to renovate CF&I's original 1901 administration building as a museum. Current plans call for creating a temporary exhibit, in order to open a portion of the archives to the public within 18 months. Subsequent exhibits will cover subjects like steel production, railroads, and the contribution of various immigrant communities to southern Colorado and the West. The museum will also be a repository for artifacts from the CF&I mines, steel mill, and the Bessemer neighborhood. You can also look BHS up on the World Wide Web at http://www.cfisteel.org/.
Jonathan Rees, director of the CF&I project, is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern Colorado.
