Golden history: a gold-rush supply town, a capital lost by one vote, the brewery, the School of Mines and Buffalo Bill on the mountain

Golden grew up where Clear Creek comes out of the foothills, on what the City’s history museum calls an access corridor between the Rocky Mountains and the Plains. It began as a supply town for the 1859 gold rush, was for a few years the capital of Colorado Territory, and lost both the capital and the railroad race to Denver. What it kept was industry and a college: a brewery that grew into the largest at a single site in the world, the Colorado School of Mines, and, a century later, a federal energy laboratory. This is the short version, from the sources listed at the foot; where they disagree, both are given.

Before Golden City

The Golden History Museum, which the City runs, says Native American history in the Clear Creek Valley and on the table lands of the Front Range goes back more than 12,000 years; in a 2024 update its director wrote that evidence from the Magic Mountain Archaeological Site in Golden shows people living here for more than 10,000 years, with Indigenous knowledge pointing to a longer presence. The museum’s 2022 ethnographic study, made with cultural advisers from six tribes, places the area within the origin places of the Moghwachi, Tabeguache and Uncompahgre bands in Ute oral history and dates the Cheyenne and Arapaho history of the Front Range to the eighteenth century. It ties the town’s founding to painful histories: the forced removal of the Utes from much of their land, and of the Cheyenne and Arapaho from Colorado after the Sand Creek Massacre.

Since 2024 a Native American Arbor, built of juniper posts cut near Ignacio and facing due east, has stood in Golden History Park, an idea that came from the museum’s Native American Advisory Board.

Golden City, 1859

Golden City was established on 16 June 1859 along Clear Creek and named for Thomas L. Golden, Wikipedia records; Mines’ own history calls it a supply center for miners and settlers. The museum’s walking tour starts with the Boston Company, which opened the first store that year to make its money “mining the miners,” with George West’s Western Mountaineer, Jefferson County’s first newspaper, upstairs. William Loveland arrived the same year; his cottage at 717 12th Street, built in 1859, is the town’s oldest building.

The tour keeps two stories from that first summer. Horace Greeley, touring the gold region, tried to ford the swollen creek on a mule beside Captain Edward Berthoud, one of the town’s founders, and was fished out with a boat hook. And a mob, with no police to call, hanged a young tavern keeper named Edgar Vanover without trial after he had been shooting wildly; in 1990 the City dedicated a park named for him, Vanover Park.

The capital

By the end of 1860, Wikipedia says, Golden City was the seat of Jefferson County and the capital of the provisional Jefferson Territory. When Colorado Territory was created in 1861, Loveland was one of the loudest voices for making Golden its capital, which it became the following year, the museum says. Wikipedia dates the capital to 2 August 1862 and adds that by the mid-1860s the title was largely honorific, with the governor living in Denver and the legislature often meeting there, though the territorial supreme court sat in Golden.

The museum tells the end of it. Loveland offered his property free: the legislature met in his wooden store on Washington Avenue in 1864 and, from 1866, upstairs in his new brick building at 1122 Washington Avenue. There, on 9 December 1867, it debated where the permanent capital should be, and Denver won by a single vote. Goldenites said the deciding vote had been bought.

Railroads, mills and a brewery

Loveland founded the Colorado Central Railroad on 9 February 1865 to tie Golden to the transcontinental line at Cheyenne, Wikipedia records. Denver’s voters backed bonds for the Denver Pacific, which got there first; by 1870 Golden had lost, and the Colorado Central turned west to Georgetown, Black Hawk and Central City, reaching Cheyenne only in 1877.

The railroad still made the north side. In the 1870s German railroad workers settled around the Colorado Central’s works there, in the district called Goosetown, the walking tour says. Astor House, built of local sandstone in 1867, housed fortune seekers and later School of Mines students. The State Demography Office’s census file gives 1871 as the year Golden incorporated and counts 2,730 people in 1880.

In 1873 Jacob Schueler and Adolph Coors, both German immigrants, opened a small brewery in an abandoned tannery at the foot of South Table Mountain, brewing to a Czech Pilsner recipe. The museum says it outlasted Prohibition by making malted milk, which it supplied to the Mars candy company, and grew into the largest single-site brewery on the planet. Wikipedia calls the Golden of those decades the “Lowell of the West,” with flour mills, smelters, brick works, a paper mill and clay and coal mines. The fire department was founded in 1879, the City says, when three rival fire companies merged.

The School of Mines

Bishop George M. Randall arrived in the territory in 1866 planning a university with a school of mines, and in 1870 opened Jarvis Hall just south of town. The School of Mines opened under the Episcopal Church in 1873, became a territorial institution in 1874 and a state one in 1876, when Colorado became a state. It held its first commencement, for two graduates, in 1883, and graduated its first woman in 1898. Since 1908, when 250 students, 20 faculty and a team of burros first made the climb, new students have carried a rock from home up Mount Zion to the hillside “M.”

The twentieth century

Golden stayed small for a long time: 2,152 people in 1900 and 2,426 in 1930, by the census. The walking tour marks the Armory of 1913, built of river rock from Clear Creek and believed to be the largest cobblestone building west of the Mississippi, which served as a Red Cross emergency hospital during the 1917–1918 flu pandemic.

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody died in Denver in 1917 and was buried on Lookout Mountain on 3 June. His wife Louisa said it was his choice; the people of Cody, Wyoming, said he wanted to lie there instead, and the museum’s history answers that close friends and the priest who gave him last rites confirmed Lookout Mountain. His foster son Johnny Baker opened a museum beside the grave in 1921, in a building called Pahaska Tepee; Denver took over the collection after Olive Baker died in 1956, and the Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave moved into its present building in 1977, still part of Denver’s mountain parks.

In 1934 and 1935, 180 Depression-era relief workers paid in meals and $1 a week built a stone amphitheater for about 2,500 people at the National Guard’s Camp George West; it stands beside the T. rex Tooth Trail in South Table Mountain Park, on Department of Energy land with no public access. In 1938 residents began collecting Golden’s artifacts, and the county commissioners, with Works Progress Administration help, made the collection the basis of the Golden History Museum, which opened in January 1939 and has been at 923 10th Street since 1996.

The Welcome Arch, 58 feet of neon over Washington Avenue reading “Howdy Folks! Welcome to Golden,” was dedicated on 24 March 1949; its tagline “Where the West Remains” became “Where the West Lives” in 1979, because “remains” sounded too much like mortal remains.

Then Golden grew: 5,238 people in 1950 and 7,118 in 1960. In 1959, Wikipedia says, the town nearly tripled in area overnight by annexing land to the south that included the new Magic Mountain theme park. The museum’s Discover magazine adds that Magic Mountain and East Tincup, another Western theme park half a mile away on Colfax, both held grand openings in 1960 and both failed soon after. The Colorado Railroad Museum arrived at the same time: Robert W. Richardson moved his collection of narrow gauge equipment from Alamosa in 1958, and he and Cornelius Hauck opened the museum in Golden in 1959.

The next arrival came from Washington. The Solar Energy Research Institute, the first federal facility dedicated to developing solar power, opened on 5 July 1977, with Golden chosen as its home and a 300-acre site on South Table Mountain in the winning proposal; it became the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 1991, and on 1 December 2025 the Department of Energy renamed it the National Laboratory of the Rockies.

Keeping the old town

Golden has kept much of its past. Astor House was slated for demolition in 1970 and bought and saved by a public vote in 1972, the walking tour records. The City’s historic preservation program began in 1983 with the 12th Street district’s listing on the National Register, and there are now three locally designated districts: 8th and 9th Street, 12th Street and East Street. When a housing development threatened the Pearce Ranch in Golden Gate Canyon in the early 1990s, its cabins were moved to town log by log from 1994 and rebuilt over four years, and Golden History Park opened in the spring of 1999. It also holds the 1876 Guy Hill schoolhouse, moved to Golden in 1976.

The 2020 census counted 20,399 people. In 2026, the 150th year of statehood, the museum opened an exhibit called Glimpses of Golden, on the town’s story from territorial capital to its present fame as a science, technology and recreation hub.