Trinidad, Colorado - A Historic Building Survey
The Buildings of Historic Trinidad
In answering the question of when a town was established, one must determine, if possible, when the first structures with any claim to permanency were built. Using this criterion, it may be said that Trinidad was born in March of 1861, when, at this site, along the banks of the clear, mountain stream called the Purgatoire, the first cluster of adobe and/or log huts appeared. Trinidad acquired her name a few months later when a grid of streets was laid out to accommodate the growth of this little frontier, territorial town. Naturally, very few buildings or even parts of buildings from that territorial period remain, but the adobe brick and mud plaster Baca House is one such building. This building is now part of the outstanding Trinidad museum complex belonging to the State Historical Society of Colorado. It was built by John Hough in 1869, and soon thereafter was acquired by Felipe Baca.
A U.S. patent to the town site was granted in 1877, which removed the obstacle of cloudy land titles in conflict with the Vigil and St. Vrain (Las Animas) Grant of 1843. Other circumstances were developing that stimulated the growth of Trinidad still further.
In 1876, the narrow-gauge Rio Grande Railroad reached the new town of El Moro about four miles down the Purgatoire, and the broad-gauge Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad laid tracks into Trinidad in the late summer of 1878. Those were important commercial links, providing, among other things, shipping facilities for the then prospering cattle and sheep ranches of the region. The coming of the railroads also gave impetus to the coal-mining industry and the related production of coke. Within a few years Trinidad was surrounded by satellite coal camps - several of them with great rows of glowing coke ovens adjacent.
During the formative first two decades of Trinidad's development the cultural traits deriving from Spain and Mexico were of prime importance in shaping the nature and character of the town. Increasing immigration from the eastern part of the country modified this, and Trinidad, like many southwestern towns, became a cultural amalgamation. The population of Las Animas County was ethnically diversified with the arrival of great numbers of men, women, and children from the countries of southern and eastern Europe. This great wave of people came primarily for the work offered by the coal mines and coke ovens. One of the outcomes of those economic and cultural changes was the so-called Ludlow Massacre of 1914. This was a classic example of management-labor strife in the early, industrial America and ranks in significance with the Pullman strike troubles in Chicago in 1894.
During the period from 1879 to 1900, Trinidad achieved much of her expansion and became the center of a large and diversified economic area in which railroading, coal mining, coke production, ranching and agriculture were all important factors. From those twenty years of growth Trinidad still has many lovely old homes and beautiful business structures of the late Victorian style. The expansion of Trinidad and of the neighboring camps continued after the turn of the century and so the town is also rich in Architecture dating from the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Partial economic paralysis set in with the 1930's. First the depression, and then basic industrial changes brought a rapid decline of the coal mining industry. As the coal camps disappeared, Trinidad settled into a time of greatly reduced prosperity. That condition probably, as much as anything, accounts for the survival in Trinidad of such a large number of buildings ranging from the territorial days to the end of the prosperous 1920's.
Dr. Morris F. Taylor
Historian
August 20, 1970
Trinidad State Junior College