Mountain Mining Days

At 10 a.m. on Saturday, September 5, 2026, a column of fire trucks and assorted other emergency vehicles came down Main Street in Walsenburg and, in the words of the local paper, “loudly announced” the start of the parade. Floats on the theme of the day followed. That was the opening of the 13th annual Mountain Mining Days, the Labor Day weekend festival this Huerfano County town holds in honor of its mining past. Admission is free. It is run by the Walsenburg Downtown Revitalization Committee, a volunteer-run nonprofit that also keeps the flower planters on Main Street. Each summer it sends a volunteer down the street before 9 a.m. in the Bloom Buggy, a water-tank vehicle, to water them.

Sixth Street and Miners Plaza

After the parade the crowd goes to the corner of Sixth and Main. Vendors and food trucks close down the block of Sixth Street beside Miners Plaza, and the street fair runs along West Sixth with food stands and pop-up shops. Many of the children’s events borrow from the mines. There are mining cart races for kids, and the 2025 program listed decorating a miner’s hat. There is also a bounce house, and in 2026 the World Journal noted “the popular children’s wheelbarrow race.”

The 2026 lineup on the plaza stage was Mariachi Diamante, El Fandango, Whiskey Sky, and Swarming Branch. The organizers’ site spells the first band “Diamente.” Mariachi Diamante, from Pueblo, opened the music. Two of its players were David Benavidez III, age 5, and Angela “Lala” Benavidez, age 3, children of the band’s director, David Benavidez Jr. The 2025 stage had carried Mason Davis, Rosin & Rust, Sam Kind, and Earbones. At dusk on the 2026 festival day, a free outdoor screening of Coco was held at Fiesta Park.

On festival day the Huerfano County Historical Society opens its two houses to the public. The Walsenburg Mining Museum is on West Fifth Street, and the Huerfano Heritage Center is on West Sixth. The 2026 sponsors included the United Mine Workers of America, listed alongside a real estate office, the local 7-Eleven, and Gub Gub’s Pizza and Ice Cream.

A new stage at Sixth and Main, 2015

The World Journal billed the 2015 festival as the second annual Mountain Mining Days. Its July preview describes a fuller weekend. On Friday evening, teams of five, each including someone 18 or younger, competed for a Corporate Cup in bowling, a water balloon toss, watermelon eating, a coal cart race, and a basketball shoot. A Mining King and Queen, chosen by the Mining Museum, were to be crowned after a performance of the play “For Tomorrow We May Die” at the Washington School Auditorium. A pancake breakfast at the Farmer’s Market came before the Saturday parade. That parade carried the Fort Carson Mounted Honor Guard and Marching Band, local mining families, the royal couple, and local veterans.

After the parade, the Fort Carson band was to start the grand opening of Miner’s Plaza at Sixth and Main. Six hours of music from Cappton Reid, Silver Eagle and the Dynamix followed on the plaza’s newly opened stage. A car show and a dunking booth were planned for Fifth and Sixth streets. The preview also listed a charity chili cook-off, a team marathon on Sunday, and the unveiling of the arts council’s newly painted mural of Mother Jones.

The 2016 parade started at 11 a.m., with the Fort Carson 4th Infantry Division Band, the John Mall High School marching band, and hot rods. It closed with a “super soaker” segment in which parade participants and the audience soaked each other with water shooters. The marathon had become a relay by then. In its second year it drew thirty racers on five teams, twice the previous year’s field. They ran from Miners Plaza out through the Black Diamond Park subdivision west of town and back, a course that replaced the earlier laps of a sports-complex oval track. The Pueblo Dynamites won in 3:23:20. The other teams were the Big Dog Mother Runners, the Huerfano Coal Picks, Eat My Dusters (winners of the Mining Spirit Award), and Team HuerfanOSHA. Kris Spinuzzi of the Big Dogs liked the format: “while one of us is running a leg of the course we get to sit and visit with our co-team members.” The race director, Ben Wiley, said his only disappointment was that no walking team had entered, though the event had been designed with one in mind.

La Plaza de los Leones and the City Built on Coal

The town was settled in 1859 as La Plaza de los Leones, named for Don Miguel Antonio de Leon, a New Mexico settler born in 1799. In his youth he had traveled with the Challifour brothers of New Mexico to the mouth of the Columbia River, and he was an old man when he came to the Cucharas. He served as alcalde, an office combining mayor and judge, and his second wife, Cruzita, was known as a midwife. According to the city’s history, social life in the settlement revolved around fandango dances.

Fred Walsen came from Germany in 1859 and reached the plaza in 1870, where he managed the Bartels General Store. A post office opened that year under the name Walsenburg, and the town was incorporated under that name in 1873. Most accounts say a Pueblo newspaper editor suggested the name. Walsen had by then moved his family to Denver as state treasurer, and no direct descendants of his remain in the town. The county seat moved from Badito to Walsenburg in 1874. In 1887 the post office was renamed “Tourist City” for just over a month before the old name returned. In 1892 the spelling “Walsenburgh” lost its final h, to make it less Germanic.

In 1876 Walsen bought the land for the first coal mine, allegedly for a wagon, a team of mules, and $100 in cash. The Denver and Rio Grande reached town that same year. The Toltec, Pictou, Maitland, Robinson, Cameron, and others followed, and Walsenburg came to be called the City Built on Coal. According to the city’s history, miners worked rooms four or five feet high on shifts of at least ten hours. They were paid only for full cars that reached the mine mouth bearing their brass tags. When a miner died underground, the coroner usually ruled the cause “the miner’s own carelessness.”

Strikes came in 1893 and in 1903 and 1904, and both failed. In 1913 the United Mine Workers set up tent cities from Walsenburg to Trinidad. Mother Jones was put on a train to Denver with orders not to return. She came back within days, was arrested at the Walsenburg station, and was held in the jail behind the courthouse, at 80 years old according to the Mining Museum’s listing. After her release she went to Washington to testify about the miners’ conditions. The jail now houses the Mining Museum, which holds memories from more than 100 mining camps in the county.

Accounts of the decline differ in their dates. The city’s history puts the population at almost 6,000 after the Second World War, when the first mines began to close, with more closing in the 1950s and 2,900 residents counted in 2014. The writer John Krist puts the peak at nearly 6,000 in 1940 and dates the decline from the shutdown of local coal in the 1950s.

A binder of obituaries on West Sixth

Krist came to the Huerfano Heritage Center in August 2023. It is a storefront on West Sixth Street between two aging hotels. The docent, John VanKeuren, unlocked the door, having been busy tending the plants. “So,” he said, “what do you want to know?” He brought out a binder indexing every obituary published in the county’s papers. Then he brought down a bound volume of the World-Independent for March 1946.

Krist’s grandfather had died in the Pictou mine on March 15 of that year. The story ran on the front page under the headline “John Krist, Jr. Killed in Pictou Mishap.” It reports that “a ‘pot’ of rock fell without warning” while he was loading coal beside his brother Rudy, who was not hurt. His was the first death recorded in the new mine. The story ends: “The deceased is a miner of 15 years’ experience with the CF&I corporation, and was listed as an expert miner.”