David R. Feineman

BY DAVID R. FEINEMAN
TREASURER, BROOMFIELD HISTORICAL SOCIETY

In 2026, we will celebrate the founding of the United States 250 years ago, and 150 years of Colorado statehood. Most people will recognize these as important anniversaries that should be marked with some memorable national and local events (which should be well along in their planning —or maybe not). But having been around for the bicentennial celebrations in 1976, I thought it might be worth a trip in the wayback machine1 to revisit that year and see if there are any lessons for us today.

Life in 1976

In 1976, my wife and I were in Tulsa, Oklahoma: my wife was working as a nurse, and I was in graduate school. There was a great deal of turmoil going on nationally at that time: the war in Vietnam had ended, but the division between groups was still apparent; the investigation into the Watergate break-in that would ultimately end Richard Nixon’s presidency had begun; the rise of OPEC and its market interactions had created an energy crisis that produced long lines at gas station pumps across the USA; and economists puzzled about remedies for stubborn stagflation when we had a recession coupled with high inflation.  

Culturally, things were also quite different. In a conservative state like Oklahoma, people with long hair (men or women) were often labeled as hippies, and people from the East Coast were called “Yankees” in a less than positive way. The 1921 race riots that occurred in Tulsa were just not openly discussed. There was no cable TV: major broadcast networks served up shows like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, M*A*S*H, and All in the Family, which mined nostalgia for the vision of an earlier, simpler time, but also began to provide some social commentary on the current changes in America.  

If you listened to pop radio, you would hear the disco music craze in full flow, though in between you might hear Elton John & Kiki Dee doing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” or Wings performing “Silly Love Songs.” But in Oklahoma, I found some of the FM stations were playing progressive country that suited the time better: the song “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” on the Viva Terlingua album by Jerry Jeff Walker takes me back to that time and place far better than “Disco Duck.”

If you went to the movies, you might have seen Taxi Driver, Rocky, or Network.  The key quote from the last one was, “I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell, ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.’”2   Perhaps that gives you a sense why people yearned for the “happy days” of the past.

Bicentennial Happenings

In the run up to 1976, I can’t say I remember much federal effort to prepare for the bicentennial: given the turmoil, it just didn’t seem like the divisions could be breached or that there was truly anything much to celebrate. But we could see signs of slow change on a local level. The most obvious and ubiquitous of these was driven by individuals and low cost: people put up flags. We saw a proliferation of historic flags, like the Betsy Ross flag, or the Don’t Tread on Me flag.  In more recent years these flags have become more controversial as they’ve been adopted by fringe political groups, but in 1976, people were using them as historic symbols of independence.

The American Freedom Train

A private effort with corporate sponsorship created a memorable element of the bicentennial: the American Freedom Train.3 The idea was to collect key artifacts from 200 years of American history and install them in train cars that were drawn by steam locomotives. The exhibit would reach most cities in the USA over the course of two years. It would be a true multimedia experience (for the time), in which visitors viewed exhibits from a moving walkway—a technological innovation that helped ensure the maximum number of visitors each day. The exhibits spanned sports, the arts, history, historic events, and scientific inventions inside a train painted in patriotic red, white, and blue livery. Tickets were required, and attendees often reported that the moving walkway didn’t give them adequate time with the exhibits, but it was a unique and extraordinary show. Below, you can see the author’s own copy of the American Freedom Train Commemorative Program.4

Even before it arrived, the organizers tried to create a buzz about about the Freedom Train.  I can still remember the advertisements that had Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner singing, “All aboard America! Here comes the Freedom Train.” I’m afraid it was what people would call an “ear worm”—one of those songs that is hard to get out of your brain once you hear it. When the exhibit rolled into Tulsa in April of 1976, we might not have had much money, but we certainly had our tickets. You didn’t need to be a train buff to be impressed by the size of the steam locomotive on the tracks in front of you, at a time when steam locomotives had been out of regular service in the USA for 20 years. I know I left feeling more of a sense of pride about being American and having a better view of our collective accomplishments over the country’s short history.

I found out that Denver wouldn’t put up money for the train to stop there, but the train did make a stop in Colorado Springs, which gained notoriety for being the first place where there was a protest about the train’s visit. A group called the People’s Bicentennial Commission complained that the entire thing was too commercial and a corporate cash grab. But the train continued to roll through the country until the end of 1976, as planned. Along the way, it intersected with a bicentennial wagon train pilgrimage, suggesting the presence of other large-scale, cross-country events occurring at the time.

What About Now?

After 50 years, I still remember the American Freedom Train’s run as a special experience linked to the bicentennial. In retrospect, motivating people to prepare for the 1976 bicentennial might not have been any easier than it is today. Apparently, there were unsuccessful discussions about having the train run again in 2026, but limitations on railroad infrastructure, changes in railroad regulations, and the difficulty in accessing artifacts appear to be more significant hurdles today than fifty years ago. At this point, a rerun of the 1976 experience seems unlikely, and because of the dramatic changes in multimedia and entertainment experiences that we are used to today, everything on the train might seem antiquated to a new audience.

I’d like to think that here in Broomfield, we can create positive and memorable experiences of our country, state, and local history that emphasize our shared values and the best qualities of American life, without hiding from the difficult challenges from our past and present. The Broomfield Historical Society is acting as the local organizing committee for national and state anniversary celebrations under an umbrella called Broomfield 2026! As you can see from the activity calendar, we have been engaging with other groups on history related programs that are running throughout this year, and we look forward to you joining us in attending those 2026 commemoration events.

And if your own feelings about America are complicated right now, you might take some comfort in knowing that this is a common sentiment around many of our country’s significant milestones.

BY DAVID R. FEINEMAN

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.¹
—Robert F. Kennedy

Sitting in an out of the way site in Broomfield, in Frank Varra Park between the Macy’s parking lot and Highway 36, is a monument to a man who died in a 1936 mine explosion and remains buried inside the mine. As with other historic sites in Broomfield, such as the Railroad Depot, Honey House, and Shep’s Grave, the location of the memorial plaque is not the site where the actual events took place.²  While much of the history of old Broomfield was about agriculture and its supporting services, this one from the local mining industry is a tragic tale from our past that is worth some greater recognition. It’s probably worth beginning with a brief introduction to the coal deposits that underlie this part of Colorado.

THE NORTHERN COAL FIELD

From the 1850s to the 1970s, coal was actively mined in multiple communities along the Front Range. The coal deposits are found interbedded within rocks from the Laramie and Denver Formations, and these deposits are the same age as local fossils of Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus Rex. Coal deposits are formed where layers of decaying plant material have become buried and compressed. Various combinations of age, pressure, and heat within the layers produce different types of coal with distinct characteristics. The coal that was mined here in Broomfield was classified as subbituminous—a type that is still used today in the USA for electrical power generation. Subbitumenous coal here and in Montana and Wyoming occurs in beds close to the ground surface which means it is relatively cheap to extract. 

Although the Northern Coal Field underlies much of the area north of Denver, a subarea of intensive mining occurred in an area that is called the Boulder-Weld Coal Field, which ran in a north easterly direction from the west side of Broomfield past Superior, Louisville, Lafayette, and Erie.

THE MONARCH #2 MINE

At the time of its operation, the Monarch Mine #2 was one of the southernmost mines in the Boulder-Weld Coal field, located in an area that was considered part of Louisville. It was operated by the National Fuel Company starting in 1909. The mine entrance and surface unloading facility (the tipple) was located at what today is the Flatirons Crossing Mall. From the entry, a shaft went down about 375 feet to where the active mining work occurred. At that depth, it was one of the deepest mines in the Boulder-Weld Coal Field.³ Tunnels went from the entry both due west, as well as northeast, crossing under highway 36. Housing for mine workers was located on the east side of Highway 36 and just north of today’s Northwest Parkway in an area called Redtail Ridge. 

Within the mine, small cars on rails were pulled by donkeys to move the coal back to the shaft where it could be brought up to the surface. There were at least 2 motorized cars that were used for moving personnel along the tracks. The coal seam thickness being mined varied between 10 and 15 feet high. Extraction proceeded as a room and pillar operation: coal was removed from a rectangular area laid out like a checkerboard, with the corners of the boxes left unmined, so that there was rock from floor to ceiling to support the roof to keep it from caving in. Reports mention the mine had 20 miles of abandoned underground tunnels adjacent to active operating areas. However, a more recent survey of local mines to understand subsidence issues clearly states that information on mine layout in the area was largely inaccurate.⁴

Reports show that the mine was typically worked by about 100 people depending on the shift. The work was hard and intrinsically dangerous. On Sunday, a skeleton crew of 10 men were underground.⁵ Three of the men were involved in work related to fire safety: two using cement to create a firewall to isolate burning parts of the previously worked that had already been abandoned, and another to check for potentially explosive methane gas and asphyxiating carbon monoxide. Underground coal mine fires could be caused by an accidental source of ignition, like sparks from the metal wheels on the cars used to move coal, or by spontaneous combustion.⁶ Such fires can even move through unmined layers of coal towards a source of oxygen and rapidly intensify when they get there. Typical practice in room and pillar mining as a final phase was to pull the pillars by removing their coal and allowing the roof to collapse, which was obviously also a dangerous undertaking.

THE MINERS’ SITUATION

National Fuel, as one of the largest coal mining firms in the area, had a company store in Louisville. The building itself still exists and is on the national and state historical site registers.⁷  Company towns had a great deal of control over the lives of miners in terms of setting curfews, restricting access with company guards, and evicting anyone who failed to follow company rules. These harsh restrictions and dangerous working conditions led to a wave of activity in unionization and demands by the United Mine Workers of America, which were rejected by mine operators. A strike was called in 1913 and ran into 1914, beginning in southern Colorado but extending to the Front Range mines by 1914. The strike was characterized by violent attacks between mine guards and Colorado National Guard troops fighting with striking miners which became known as the Colorado Coalfield War.⁸ The war ended without an agreed settlement to grievances of the workers—the strike simply ended when the union ran out of money.
The Broomfield oral history interview of Chuck Waneka⁹ adds some clarity about how the miners’ strike played out locally.¹⁰ His recollection was that strike activity happened over a period of 10 years and only ended when the National Guard arrived and started putting striking miners in jail. The mine operators hired non-union workers to replace them, and if one of those workers made the mistake of leaving company property, they risked being badly beaten by locals.

You might think that the mine owners are coming off badly here in terms of their treatment of workers: you would be right. It was common for miners in the Front Range coal fields to be paid by the tonnage rule. This simple performance metric meant that the more coal you produced in a shift, the more you got paid. The downside to that was there was no compensation for safety-related activities, which essentially incentivized less safe work habits. For example, the Monarch Mine #2 was regarded as a “dirty mine” with a large accumulation of dry coal dust in the tunnels used to haul coal back to the surface, which could act as an accelerant if a fire ever started.¹¹

The oral history interview with Chuck Waneka also mentions the use of child labor in the mines. He started work in a mine in Lafayette at 13 years old, while Ron Fenolia’s interview says his father started work in the local mines at 11 years old.¹² Apparently, wages for children were around $1 per day, plus 10 cents for oil for their miner’s lamp. There is also a description of a grisly worksite death. At about the same time an adult miners’ wages were about $3 per day plus money for the oil in their lamps.

Women were not employed to work in Colorado coal mines and even visits to non-working mines were a rarity.¹³

THE MONARCH #2 MINE DISASTER OF 1936

Over a Sunday evening shift, late in January of 1936, a small crew was working in the mine. Because of the nature of the assigned tasks, most were working at some distance from one another. At 6:20 a.m. on Monday, January 20, there was an explosion and fire deep in the mine, which also caused damage to the mine’s surface facilities. Of the 10 men who were in the mine, two managed to escape to safety through an air shaft. The remaining eight men were killed, either by the fire, collapsing rubble, or asphyxiation. By the time a rescue operation could make it back into the mine, there were no survivors. They managed to find and recover seven bodies but were unable to find the body of Joe C. Jaramillo, the stable boss, who tended the mules used below ground in the mine’s operation. There is conjecture that he was the person working closest to the point of ignition of the fire and explosion, but a definitive official cause was never found. 

Nevertheless, tucked inside a long oral history captured in 1987 from Katie Mosher¹⁴ is this passage talking about the Monarch Mine explosion¹⁵:

It was caused from an electric car that went in and brought the coal out, and they would drive those cars way back in, and coming out, the sparks flew and they got gas somewhere and it blew up. Ray Bailey was the one I knew real well. He’d been after me for months to come up and take me down in the mine and show me what it was like down there. He and my brother worked down there.

He took me up there one night after work. I went up and we went up in there and the sparks started flying of of that rail with those iron wheels and it scared me. I think it was two nights after that that it blew up and he got killed. And then I couldn’t even sleep.

The National Fuel Company apparently made offers to Jaramillo’s family to get them to agree to discontinue the search for his body given the cost and danger of the operation, and ultimately an agreement was reached to end recovery activity. He therefore remains buried within the abandoned mine somewhere under what is today Flatirons Crossing Mall. The company erected a monument to the killed miners that was place at what had been the mine entrance. The monument to the lost miners was moved to Frank Varra Park during the construction of the mall.

The article citied earlier, “Blast: The 1936 Monarch Mine Explosion,” by William Cohen, provides a great deal of information on the recovery efforts, the autopsies and the legal proceedings and investigations that followed on from the disaster, as well as biographies of the individual miners.¹⁶  The immediate post-incident court case found there was no definitive cause for the explosion, which meant that National Fuel was not negligent in its operation of the mine. Even at the time, there appeared to be significant uncertainty about the validity of that conclusion.

THE END OF THE LINE

Many sources say the mine was immediately shut down after the explosion, which would seem like a fitting epitaph for the miners lost during the disaster. The real situation appears to be different, in that only the portion of the mine damaged in the explosion was sealed off, allowing new access to be implemented and operations restarted. The WPA Guide to 1930s Colorado that was published in 1941 has the following entry for Louisville:¹⁷

Left from Louisville to the MONARCH MINE (visitors not encouraged), 4 m., still a large producer despite the fact that a part of its workings was destroyed in 1936 by an explosion that killed eight persons.

The book Coal Mining in Colorado’s Northern Field states that the mine reopened as soon as debris from the explosion could be cleared, and the mine remained operating until 1947, a full eleven years after the incident.¹⁸

LEGACIES

What is below our feet in the former coal mining areas of the Front Range may not always be inert and harmless. Investigations after the Marshall Fire revealed an underground coal seam that had been smoldering under Marshall Mesa for about 100 years.¹⁹ Today around 40 additional coal seam fires are known to exist in Colorado.²⁰

Abandoned mines can create subsidence issues over time as supporting structure from when the mines were active begin to decay and collapse.²¹  Subsidence and surface collapse issues had begun to be observed even when mining activity was still active along the Front Range in areas where mines were less than 200 feet below the surface: the 1975 Coal Mine Subsidence and Land Use report made by the State of Colorado cataloged a large number. Deeper mine related surface subsidence is still possible and detectable with precise surveying.

The coal seams themselves remain under our feet as well, unlikely to be called upon again given the amount of development, population growth, and land costs along the entire Boulder-Weld trend combined with the decline in coal demand. The transformation of communities like Superior, Lafayette, Louisville, and Erie in the last 100 years from hardscrabble mining towns to their present state as desirable upscale communities seems incredible.

It doesn’t seem like there was much learning from the disaster that factored into coal mine safety: additional coal mine disasters occurred elsewhere in Colorado after the Monarch #2 mine. Findings by internal government researchers about the potential risks of dry coal dust and methane gas in mines were not immediately implemented into new safety standards.

Most people in Broomfield don’t know that there’s an underground coal mine within the City and County. This is not too surprising since the surface evidence was removed a long time ago and later replaced by Flatirons Crossing Mall. After the disaster in 1936, the National Fuel Company erected a headstone above the site of the mine collapse following the explosion where Joe Jaramillo’s body was believed to be located. With the later development of the site, the marker was moved to the north side of the Macy’s parking lot at Flatirons Crossing Mall in a secluded area of Frank Varra Park. Nearby, a second plaque lists the names of all who were lost in the explosion. This monument doesn’t just represent the men who lost their lives. It’s also a stark reminder that many issues from this story remain unresolved—the mines are a precarious and volatile foundation we shouldn’t ignore.

Endnotes

1. Robert F. Kennedy, BrainyMedia Inc., https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/robert_kennedy_135398.

2. The Broomfield Railroad Depot and Crawford’s Honey House were originally located along the railroad tracks in Old Broomfield near today’s Great Scotts Restaurant and were moved to their present location on Depot Hill. Shep was a stray dog that was adopted by the toll takers along Highway 36, and after he passed his grave was moved when the highway was widened, and is now adjacent to the Depot Museum.

3. U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, “Extent of Abandoned Coal-Mine Workings and Locations of Mine Shafts, Adits, Air Shafts, and Faults,” Compiled by S.B. Roberts, J.L. Hynes, and C.L. Woodward, Geologic Investigations Series I-2735, November 6, 2000, https://pubs.usgs.gov/imap/i-2735/i-2735.pdf.

4. A. R. Myers, J. B. Hansen, R. A. Lindvall, J. B. Ivey, and J. L. Hynes, “EG-09 Coal Mine Subsidence and Land Use in the Boulder-Weld Coalfield: Boulder and Weld Counties, Colorado,” January 1, 1975, https://doi.org/10.58783/cgs.eg09.meyv6190.

5. William M. Cohen, “Blast: The 1936 Monarch Mine Explosion,” The Louisville Historical Museum, Louisville, Colorado, August 31, 2006,  https://www.louisvilleco.gov/home/showdocument?id=1142.

6. Stephen B. Roberts, “Coal in the Front Range Urban Corridor—An Overview of Coal Geology, Coal Production, and Coal-Bed Methane Potential in Selected Areas of the Denver Basin, Colorado, and the Potential Effects of Historical Coal Mining on Development and Land-Use Planning,” Professional Paper 1698 Energy Resource Studies, Northern Front Range, Colorado, https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/2005/1698/508/chapF.html#heading157773992.

7. “National Fuel Company Store,”  History Colorado, January 14, 1986, https://www.historycolorado.org/location/national-fuel-company-store.

8. Wikipedia contributors, “Colorado Coalfield War,” Wikipedia, October 12, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Coalfield_War.

9. Charles (Chuck) Waneka was born on his family’s farm in Lafayette in 1921 and was local farmer who raised wheat, barley, corn, alfalfa, and cattle.

10. “Oral History interview of Chuck Waneka and wife Lois, interviewed by their unnamed granddaughter,” Broomfield History Collections, https://hub.catalogit.app/broomfield-history-collections/entry/3bae16d0-473f-11ed-ab8a-bf49b1a63c01?query=waneka.

11. Cohen, “Blast: The 1936 Monarch Mine Explosion.”

12. “Oral history interview of Ron J Fenolia, interviewed by Nancy Lawthers on February 8th, 1996,” Broomfield History Collections, https://hub.catalogit.app/broomfield-history-collections/entry/3c5cf470-473f-11ed-ab8a-bf49b1a63c01?query=fenolia.

13. Carolyn, Conarroe, Coal Mining in Colorado’s Northern Field, 2001.

14. Katie Mosher arrived in Broomfield with her family in 1925. Her father’s farm grew beets, corn, hay, and wheat on land owned by Mr. Zang. When they started construction of Broomfield Heights she opened a cafe in the old post office in the Jones Hall Building.

15. “Oral History Interview with group, held on August 19, 1987,” Broomfield History Collections, https://hub.catalogit.app/broomfield-history-collections/entry/3d9155c0-473f-11ed-ab8a-bf49b1a63c01?query=Monarch.

16. Cohen, “Blast: The 1936 Monarch Mine Explosion.”

17. The WPA Guide to 1930s Colorado, 1987.

18. Conarroe, Coal Mining in Colorado’s Northern Field.

19. Tim Drugan, “Boulder Tackles Century-old Underground Coal Fire at Marshall Mesa: Major Mitigation Project Set for Fall,” The Boulder Reporting Lab, July 22, 2024, https://boulderreportinglab.org/2024/07/21/boulder-tackles-century-old-underground-coal-fire-at-marshall-mesa-major-mitigation-project-set-for-fall/.

20. Tom Howarth, “Colorado Has an Underground Fire That’s Been Burning for Over 100 Years,” Newsweek, November 4, 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/colorado-has-underground-fire-burning-over-100-years-1977350.

21. J.E. Turney, Al Amundson, Celia Greenman, and Bruce K. Stover, “SP-26 Subsidence Above Inactive Coal Mines: Information for the Homeowner,” January 1, 1985.  https://doi.org/10.58783/cgs.sp26.bkad3661.