Georgetown Energy Museum

At the east end of Sixth Street in Georgetown, on the corner of Griffith Street, a power plant built in 1900 still makes electricity. Xcel Energy owns and operates the plant. The Georgetown Energy Museum, a separate Colorado nonprofit, leases part of the building from the company and opens it without charge from Memorial Day through the first week in October. The tour is self-guided, and donations help keep the door open. A Denver Post writer described the place in 2000 as a building covered with stamped tin, with a large room beside the exhibits that “smells of oil and thrums with the sound of the generators.”

The museum’s Facebook page calls it the oldest working hydroelectric plant in the United States. The marker the Town of Georgetown and Historic Georgetown, Inc. erected in 2007 at Main and Griffith makes a narrower claim: one of Colorado’s oldest alternating-current hydroelectric facilities still generating electricity.

Two Pelton wheels and a needle valve

The plant draws its water from the Georgetown reservoir, also called the forebay, about .9 mile up the canyon toward Guanella Pass. The water falls 700 feet through a 30-inch penstock and reaches the plant at 275 pounds per square inch. It drives two generator and water wheel sets of 720 kilowatts each, about 1.5 megawatts in all. The museum reckons that is enough for 700 to 1,000 homes and businesses. The wheels are of the Pelton design, which claims 90 percent efficiency.

The water arrives with more pressure than the wheels need, so a needle valve holds each one at 360 revolutions a minute. At that speed the directly coupled generator produces 60-cycle current, which can be synchronized with the grid. An electric motor at the right side of the wheel sets the valve. The motor takes its orders by computer link from Cabin Creek, a pumped-storage hydroelectric plant up the canyon, which the museum places about five miles toward Guanella Pass. All maintenance and monitoring of the Georgetown plant is done from there.

Current leaves through a substation at the south end of the building. A transmission line from the Colorado grid also feeds that substation, and from it power goes to Georgetown, to Silver Plume, and north on a line to Empire and the Henderson mining operation. The Post in 2000 followed the output as far as the Eisenhower Tunnel’s lights.

Inside each generator, twenty electromagnets spin on the rotor. Each is an iron oblong wound with copper wire, and as each one passes the fixed wires of the stator, current is induced. Dennis Seibel, the museum’s director when the Post visited, put it this way: “To create electrical energy, you just need a conductor, a magnetic field and motion between them.” That year a Plexiglas device called a Spinerator demonstrated the principle.

A brass washer and a 12,000-volt spark

Meters and relays in the control room watch the generators and the power they produce, to keep the output compatible with the rest of the grid. Until the late 1960s an operator staffed the room through the day and stayed on call through the night. The instruments are now read at Cabin Creek.

Nearby, a Jacob’s Ladder sends 12,000 volts across two copper wires. The spark jumps at their narrowest gap, heats the air to a thousand degrees, and climbs the wires as the hot air rises.

The household appliances include a brass-tub clothes washer made by the Nineteen Hundred Washer Company. It carries patent dates as late as October 1919, so the museum judges it was made in 1920 or later. Its motor, with a patent date of 1905, was belted to an agitator that rocked a tub filled by hand with warm soapy water. The motor still runs. Historic photographs trace the plant’s changes over the decades, and a separate display honors scientists who worked out the principles of electricity.

Gas lamps, stripped hills, and the move to Sixth Street

The museum’s timeline begins in 1876, when Georgetown’s gas works was established to light the streets. The Engineering and Technology History Wiki gives December 1881 as the date the Georgetown Gas Company was organized; it built a retort and supplied manufactured gas. The museum records that in 1881 the works adopted a more dependable process and came under new owners.

Electric power began around December 16, 1886, when the Electric Light Company started generating direct current from water power. By that December, 100 street lights in town ran on electricity. In March 1887, homes could have “light switches” installed. That summer the gas and electric companies competed for the street-lighting contract, and in August the gas company won it for three years.

The mines drove what followed. The wiki’s account places the gold and silver workings far from streams that could power a plant, in country without coal. Direct current could not carry over such distances. Wood was the only fuel, and the hills had been cut over for mine timbers, steam boilers, and heating, until the cost of wood was bankrupting some mines. Seibel told the Post that wood “was becoming very scarce - all of these mountains were stripped of their trees.”

Alternating current offered a way out. In 1890 the Georgetown Selectmen granted a franchise for a new hydroelectric plant at 4th and Brownell streets. The wiki states that in April 1891 The Electric Company installed a small AC plant in Hall’s Mill, used only for street lighting. The museum’s timeline records that a new AC plant in 1891 fed carbon-arc street lights, and that electricity became prevalent in the area’s mines.

In April 1893 the electric and gas companies merged as the United Light and Power Company of Clear Creek County. A line was built that year to Silver Plume; the wiki gives its length as two miles, the museum as two and a half. In August, after the crash of silver prices, the town ordered its street lighting discontinued. The gas works closed in September 1894.

The present plant went up in 1900 at the east end of Sixth Street. The old plant at 4th and Brownell was abandoned because the south fork of Clear Creek offered greater head. An Allis-Chalmers Corliss steam engine, spelled “Alice Chalmers” on the museum’s pages, was producing power by October, and two water wheel sets by November. The IEEE plaque on the site calls the plant “unusual in employing both steam and water power” and its owner “a pioneer in using three-phase, 60-Hertz alternating current and in being interconnected with other utilities.”

In July 1900 work began on a five-mile line to the mining district at Lamartine. That line led to interconnection with two other hydroelectric plants and with the Cascade Electric Company in Idaho Springs. By the museum’s account the line reached Idaho Springs in 1901, and the building was completed that April. The timeline adds that the electricity let marginal mines stay open.

Steam proved costly. There was no coal in the surrounding mountains, and all of it came up from Denver, so the engine ran only when the reservoir fell too low to turn the wheels. In 1902 United Light and Power bought land to move the dam up South Clear Creek. The move raised the head from 480 feet to nearly 670 and replaced the 16-inch penstock with a 30-inch one. Pipelines from Green Lake and Clear Lake added water, and in 1903 the dams at both lakes were being raised about eight feet.

The building grew in step. In July 1902 the company added 20 feet to the north end, after being granted the right to move Main Street 20 feet north. The same year brought a third water wheel set, a brick transformer house to the south and west, and an office and coal room at the south end. By late December 1902 the plant was supplying Central City, Black Hawk, and Nevadaville.

Motorcycles, a flood, and a man on the roof

In February 1906 the Green and Clear Lakes Company, Cascade Electric, and United Light and Power merged as the United Hydro-Electric Company. That spring the plant took on more steam rather than less. Two water-tube boilers were added to run a new Parsons steam turbine and a 500-kilowatt generator, and a 90-foot stack, 5 feet across, stood by June. The Corliss engine was still in service. A Pelton wheel was installed by May on the 720-kilowatt General Electric generator, replacing the original wheel. In April work began on a 15-foot addition at the front of the plant to house new switch gear. A second Pelton wheel and a new generator followed in July 1908.

In 1909 a combining gambrel roof was built over the two earlier gables to shed the heavy snows. On September 24 of that year a flange broke on the 24-inch penstock and left the building in “knee-deep” water. In November 1911 the company bought two motorcycles, one for the repairman, Hanson, and one for the collector, Hancock. The office got a cement floor in September 1913.

The museum’s pages disagree on the 1916 sale. The about page says United Hydro Electric was sold that July to the Colorado Power Company. The timeline names the Central Colorado Power Company.

The sources also differ on when the steam equipment left. The about page says the machinery was retired before the First World War but the boilers and engine stayed until 1918. The timeline says the Corliss engine was removed before the war. Either way, in January 1918 the Georgetown Courier reported that “the steam turbine, engine, boiler and big smoke stack of the Hydro Electric plant, which has been standing idle for several years, is being taken out and will probably be shipped to Salida for use at the Colorado Power Company’s plant there.” That same January, Charles Melvin, a contract worker, was electrocuted on the plant roof. In March the steam-era equipment was loaded on cars, and the stack went with it.

A Dodge truck replaced the company’s animal team in June 1919, after 18 years. In May 1920 the power company tore down a planing mill that had stood since the 1870s. Colorado Power became Public Service of Colorado in 1924. Water wheel No. 2 was enlarged in 1939. In 1941 the 1902 penstock was replaced and rerouted to the east side of the building. The high combining roof came off, and the roof over the engine room and machine shop was turned 90 degrees and braced with steel, the form it keeps today. Cabin Creek joined the grid in 1976, and Xcel bought Public Service of Colorado in 1999.

Retired employees and a chemical engineer

The museum began in 1993, when retired company employees started giving free tours to show how the plant worked. In 1997 the museum hired Dennis Seibel as executive director, and the displays expanded under him. The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported that he resigned that August from the Gallatin County Historical Society and Pioneer Museum in Montana to take the post.

Seibel was born in Bozeman in 1947. He held a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and master’s degrees in chemical engineering and history, and he performed as Mark Twain and Norman Rockwell. His obituaries credit him with completely restoring “the dilapidated hydro-electric plant” into an energy museum for Historic Georgetown. “There’s a sense that all you have to do is plug two things into a wall,” he told the Post. He died at his home in Cortez on March 5, 2013.

On July 31, 1999, the IEEE Denver Section dedicated the Georgetown Steam/Hydro Generating Plant as IEEE Milestone No. 27. The plaque can be seen at the museum.

The forebay dam and reservoir and the penstock are contributing parts of the Georgetown Hydroelectric Historic District, which is considered eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. On November 29, 2021, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission determined, with the State Historic Preservation Officer concurring, that an emergency undertaking would adversely affect the district. In May 2022 the commission authorized Public Service Company of Colorado to disconnect the penstock at the forebay dam as an emergency action to protect public safety. Alpine Archaeological Consultants had documented the dam, reservoir, and penstock in April 2022, before the repair work. The Georgetown Energy Museum signed the resulting agreement as a concurring party. Under its terms, archival copies of the record are to be offered to local bodies, the museum among them, to be made available free of charge to the public on request.