WHAT’S HAPPENING IN GOLDEN TODAY?
8AM-8PM Ride with the Bulls @ Jefferson County Fairgrounds (map)
Cattle and horse show running with the National Western Stock Show! Free parking and free admission. View flyer
10AM-3PM Brunch at the Rose @ Buffalo Rose
12-2PM Full Walking Tour @ Dinosaur Ridge
4-7:30PM Sunday Swing with the Flatirons Jazz Orchestra @ Buffalo Rose
SEE THE COMPLETE CALENDAR OF EVENTS.
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LIVE MUSIC
12-3PM CW Wooten @ Buffalo Rose (Sky Bar Stage)
3-6PM Big Hooray Bluegrass @ Over Yonder
4-7PM Robert Szabo – Country Kick-Off to the Stock Show @ The Golden Mill
This outlaw country music performer from Austin Texas brings his finger picking style tunes along with those from legendary musicians such as Blaze Foley, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark along with crowd favorites from George Strait to Zach Bryan. You’ll get that old time feeling of sitting on a friend’s porch.
8PM Karaoke @ Ace Hi Tavern
GOLDEN HISTORY MOMENT
A Ton of Bricks
By Guest Historian Donna Anderson
A ton of bricks comes from about a ton of brick-clay, without which bricks would not exist. Humble brick-clay has been used for the last 10,000 years to build homes, monuments, and other remarkable buildings. Beginning 6000 years ago, it has been used to make water and, yes, sewer pipe, i.e., plumbing, essential for public health and welfare. Brick-clay contains iron and magnesium mixed with aluminum, making it fire at lower temperatures than aluminum-rich fire-clay; hence its use for brick and pipe-making.
Golden was a center of brick-clay mining from the 1860s to 2001. Golden brick-clay mines, such as the Rubey, Rockwell and Apex mines, were the domain of the Parfet family beginning in 1877. Initially mined like coal using underground tunnels, brick-clay mining turned to exclusively surface quarrying after World War II. Several of Golden’s mined-out quarries first became garbage dumps, followed by parking lots, Jeffco County buildings, athletic fields (Rooney Road Athletic Complex and the Mines intramural fields), a mobile home park, and Fossil Trace Golf Course. One former quarry is buried under the interchange of I-70 and C-470. Brick-clay mining is active today at the North Chieftain Mine on the southwest side of Green Mountain, north of Alameda Parkway.
Why so much brick-clay in and around Golden? Like Golden’s black diamonds (coal), brick-clay occurs in the Laramie Formation, a rock unit that trends north-south across the west side of Golden. The Laramie also contains amazing dinosaur tracks and palm-tree imprints visible today along the Weimer Geology Trail at Colorado School of Mines and Triceratops Trail west of Fossil Trace Golf Course. These features occur together because of how Laramie sediments were deposited: across an extensive delta plain, somewhat like that of today’s Mississippi River around New Orleans. Swamps with decaying vegetation like palm trees eventually formed coal, and shallow lakes with less vegetation became filled with clay during flood times. Dinosaurs and primitive mammals walked around on the soft, clayey ground among the lakes and swamps, leaving behind footprints.
Around 66 million years ago the rocks in the Laramie Formation were tilted up to vertical, eroded, and then buried for over 30 million years. About 2 million years ago ancestral Clear Creek and its tributaries, like Kinney Run Gulch, began carving out today’s landscape, re-exposing the Laramie Formation. Euro-Americans settling Golden in 1859 saw the coal and clay in the Laramie Formation as resources and began mining operations in the early 1860s. The rest is modern history.
All this for a ton of bricks.
Guest Columnist Donna Anderson and Paul Haseman published a book called Golden Rocks: The Geology and Mining History of Golden, Colorado.
Thanks to the Golden History Museum for providing the online cache of historic Transcripts, and to the Golden Transcript for documenting our history since 1866!
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