Sunset on Sunrise: Boom and Bust in the Iron-Rich Hills of a High Desert Mining Town

“The now abandoned town . . . lies on the floor of Eureka Canyon, surrounded by [walls]. Red dust covers everything . . . including the trees and the buildings. The property is overgrown with native shrubs and grasses [amidst] the remains of domestic fruit trees, roses, lilacs, and perennial flowers.” This description of Sunrise, a defunct mining town in eastern Wyoming, leads off the narrative part of its documentation in the National Register of Historic Places. Like many towns that grew up around extracting valuable metals out of the earth, Sunrise appears stripped and empty. The impression is misleading, though, because the lonely site actually contains a very full story of technology, labor, and immigration in what’s left of its small town setting.

The Sunrise Mine Historic District, listed in the National Register in 2005, is a 225-acre property in the foothills of Wyoming’s high desert, about halfway between Casper and Cheyenne, owned today by a private citizen. It is the site of one of the West’s earliest and longest-lived iron mining operations, where several technical developments were pioneered, and significant in the history of community planning.

The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which ran both mine and town, wielded enormous influence over how its employees lived. Immigrants flocked to the remote area in search of work, which saw a unique ethnic intermingling, and in later years was a lab for evolving relations between labor and management.

The iron-rich hills went undiscovered until relatively late. In 1880, after gold had fizzled, copper replaced it as the moneymaker. But within seven years the cost of hauling ore via mule to a smelter–coupled with a 40 percent drop in the price of copper over a four-year period–spelled the end.

A sharp-eyed local rancher, who had visited Minnesota’s iron mines, started buying up Sunrise claims. Samples of the local ore were displayed at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair and–at 60 percent pure–were billed as “superior to all other domestic and foreign samples.” Iron mining began in earnest. In the next few years, the rest of the West caught on and it wasn’t long before deep-pocketed corporations showed up. The Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, which was putting heavy capital into the ore as part of an expansion, bought the mine for $500,000.

The town functioned from 1898 to 1980 and while the unchanging nature of the low scrubby hills might suggest timelessness, global developments–both technological and social–took firm root here.

Today’s historic district comprises about 20 buildings along with an assortment of ruins and foundations. With around 500 residents at its peak, Sunrise was laid out in a grid pattern with tree-lined streets. World War I-era photos taken from a hill depict a settlement of hiproofed cottages and a church steeple amidst a series of smokestacks.

The mine was crucial in the development of both Wyoming and Colorado, since it fed smelters elsewhere. At first, miners simply blasted the ground apart with dynamite, then picked out the ore with a steam shovel. A company railroad carried it 375 miles to a smelter in Pueblo, Colorado, which was rapidly expanding to meet demand.

After a few years, the pits became so deep they were impossible to get at from the surface. This brought about an innovation called the “glory hole,” which included excavating chutes in areas that rail cars and other equipment could no longer reach. The chutes were linked to tunnels lined with a system of tracks and cars. As before, the pits were blasted except now the broken rock fell down the chutes to be collected and hauled out of the mine via a hoisting shaft.

In 1927, another innovation replaced the glory hole. “Block caving” undercut large sections so they would collapse and break on their own. These city-block-size portions would fall into a newly excavated void where the ore could be hauled out.

World War II demand fostered major changes. Sunrise was one of just a few underground iron mines in the United States and the only one west of the Missouri. Structures known as head frames were built at the tops of shafts, which housed hoisting and loading systems. In 1945, one head frame nearly topped 200 feet, the nation’s tallest. Today the site gives a picture of technology whose impacts are still felt. According to the National Register description, the setting is intact, with no modern intrusions. What remains as well are the ghostly traces of personal lives. Sunrise was a company town in a time before organized labor. The paternal presence permeated the place–including the company houses, which workers were required to rent, and the company newspaper, Camp and Plant, published in Italian, German, Spanish, and English for everyone whose labor supported the far-flung CF&I empire.

The immigrants first arrived in the early stages of mining, coming in numbers as it thrived. Greeks were among the most numerous, forming Greek work gangs, living in Greek houses, and founding a Socrates society to help sick and struggling countrymen. The Italians had a social group called the Dante Alighieri Society. The nationalities were many, extending beyond Europe and into Asia and the Middle East. Many of the immigrants who came to Sunrise quickly sent word back home that there was work in the American West, with the resulting diversity still visible today in the face of the population.

In 1902 the company built the Sociological Hall, a recreational building. In 1917 a YMCA went up. The Italian Renaissance revival structure, which still stands, was the community centerpiece. The ’20s brought duplexes for the increasing number of workers. At its peak, the town had about 50 houses, a train depot, and a filling station. Today, the site still bears evidence of a carefully planned community. Bridges, sidewalks, sewers, and rock-walled terraces extend up the hillsides, with clothesline poles still marking now-overgrown yards.

CF&I had its share of labor troubles in its mines, plants, and towns. In April 1914, National Guardsmen fired on striking miners and their families in a now infamous showdown at Ludlow, Colorado. The dead included 11 women and 2 children.

John D. Rockefeller, a major CF&I investor determined not to repeat the experience, set up one of the first company-run unions. Although miners could elect representatives to discuss concerns with management, it was a far cry from a real union. The arrangement was influential in the later years of labor relations.

With the advent of the automobile, workers no longer had to live in town. Sunrise began a slow decline. While World War II brought a burst of prosperity–plus unprecedented feats to reach deeper veins of ore–the domestic steel market eventually faced tough competition from foreign suppliers. The mine continued profitably until 1959, when a strike shut down the steel industry for nearly four months. Manufacturers turned to less expensive Japanese and Korean imports. This was the beginning of American steel’s gradual demise. The Sunrise mine eked along until 1980, when it closed. Many of the buildings were either burned or torn down. Six remaining houses, the Y, the old boiler structures, and other remnants today comprise what the National Register nomination calls a “quiet testament to a major mining operation of the last century.”

A research project at the University of Wyoming’s American Studies Program yielded the National Register nomination, with students and faculty visiting the site and interviewing retired mine workers and their families. The Bessemer Historical Society, based in Pueblo, Colorado, has published Sunrise, a Chronology of a Wyoming Mine, an exhaustive history of the operation from its beginnings to its end. Today, the owner of the historic district would like to see the interpretive potential, inherent in both the nomination and the book, realized.

For more information, contact the Bessemer Historical Society at info@cfisteel.com or Kara Hahn at the Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, khahn@state.wy.us.