Another man lured here by the gold rush was George Mortimer
Pullman, who came to Colorado in 1860 to make the money necessary to put together
a company to build the sleeper railcars he had recently invented. Pullman
settled to gold milling at the town of Russell Gulch above Central City, as
well as operating a freight business and keeping a store in Central City, under
the name of Lyon, Pullman & Company. Being at a midway point on his
constant journeys back and forth between Central City and Denver, the way station
of James Snow caught his attention. In 1860 Pullman started moving to
acquire it as his own personal enterprise. Spafford C. Field, the brother
of his associate Benjamin Field in Illinois (his partner in inventing the Pullman
cars) who had just moved to Colorado as another partner to Pullman, traded 5
yoke of oxen and a lumber wagon, worth $400, for the station house, spring and
160 acres surrounding them. He also purchased 160 acres of Edgecomb's
parcel for $100 in the fall of 1860. The Nye parcel had since been repossessed
by the County sheriff and sold to George Harlow, who sold 160 acres of it to
Field that same fall. Field conveyed his parcels to John F. Vandevanter,
R.D. Thompson and Moore, who were all business associates of Pullman.
Another associate, miner Samuel F. Cooper in Russell Gulch, claimed 160 acres
to link the existing claimed parcels of land. Snow, Harlow and Edgecomb
were taken on as new partners in the enterprise and each retained half of their
original holdings. J.S. Pimple and James E. Lyon, also business associates
of Pullman, each claimed 160 acres apiece to the south to add to the enterprise
while Pullman himself claimed his own 160 acre parcel. On May 20, 1861,
what Pullman named the Cold Spring Ranch was officially platted, now a prominent
way station ranch of 1600 acres, which under Pullman had been expanded to 10
times its original size.
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Pullman had the idea to arrange this purchase for
use as a stopover point on his business trips between Central City and
Denver, and kept a buggy and horse team stationed there. He also
used it to store goods when his business at Central City ran out of
space. However, like contemporary William Loveland, Pullman had
a talent for turning a personal material necessity into a money-making
enterprise. The Cold Spring Ranch became a prominent base camp
for the gold fields, where patrons could sleep inside the station house
itself, dwell in other ranch buildings, or camp out on the surrounding
acreage, sometimes for sizable amounts of time. Being constantly
supplied with water from the cool spring obviously did not hurt in this
endeavor. The station house itself would have served a myriad
of uses, including sleeping quarters, general store and saloon, perhaps
even a public hall. The Cold Spring Ranch became a central point
for Pullman's freighting business between Central City and Denver, and
he harvested hay on the ranch to make more money. One of the most
valuable and profitable items of freight Pullman had were hammer handles,
which were greatly needed by the miners in Central City. Pullman
himself stayed in this house many times, as the trip between Denver
and Central City could not take place in a day back in the early 1860s. |
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In time Pullman and his associates sold off the ranch after a successful five-year run. Although his tenure was brief, Pullman remade the Cold Spring Ranch into the famous institution history records, encompassing an acreage bounded on the east by the eastern boundary of what is now Camp George West, on the west by Ulysses Street, on the north by North Table Mountain and on the south by West 4th Avenue, and gave it its name. After returning to Illinois Pullman became rich and internationally famous selling his railroad cars, for which the capital to build the company had been raised in Colorado, and his company was among the most prominent in American history. However, Pullman always continued to hold a fondness in his heart for the time he spent in Colorado, and collected all the literature he could on Colorado of the early 1860s. Often he even visited Colorado with his family, undoubtedly taking time to visit his old way station in the process.
In 1868, William (Billy) Martin, who ran the Railroad
House hotel in downtown Golden near what would be 11th and Ford streets,
leased the property and continued to run the Cold Spring Ranch as an
important area institution. He added a two-story log addition
of several rooms to the building, at which time it was also revealed
part of it could be used as a dance hall. This addition was to
the side and above the original building, requiring the dismantling
of its roof and chimney to do so. Martin also built a nearby race
track on South Golden Road where area residents raced horses.
Jonas Morrison Johnson Sr., a prominent and prosperous Golden citizen,
was the man who purchased the Cold Spring Ranch from the Pullman interests
and continued its story of success from there. Johnson was no
stranger to running a lodging establishment, having run the Johnson
House hotel in Golden since 1859. He also served as county sheriff,
a post later occupied by his son. A citizen with an eye to civic
duty, he also donated three block's worth of land to help establish
the Catholic church in Golden in 1867. |
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