View from the cupola

Vampire in the vault

At MPOW, we took our annual retreat yesterday. Instead of team-buliding or brainstorming or the like, we went to the Bessemer Historical Society, the site of the archives for the old Colorado Fuel and Iron (or CF&I) company, across Interstate 25 from the Pueblo steel works.

The society contains the CF&I archives, thousands of cubic feet of paper records, photographs, films, X-rays (!) and more from the Rockefeller-owned, “vertically-integrated” (i.e., the company owned the mines, the rails, the mills, the workers’ homes, the workers’ hospitals, etc.) industrial giant.

CF&I will be forever associated with the Ludlow Massacre, in which eleven women and two children were killed as part of a brutal strikebreaking campaign in Ludlow, Colorado in 1914. (Read more in this excerpt from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.)

Now CF&I doesn’t exist as a company anymore, but has been folded into the Oregon Steel Company as the much smaller Rocky Mountain Steel Mill (see the history of the company on the Bessemer Historical Society page).

The archives, run primarily by archivist Jay Trask, and assistant archivist Bev Allen, are housed in one of the old CF&I administrative buildings. The building is incredible: huge, crammed with the “stuff” of the old company, and in various states of disrepair. I was so taken with the building and all the odd stuff in it, that my photos of our retreat hardly feature the librarians and archivists at all, but instead concentrate on the place.

For my volunteer work, I hauled boxes and binders out of the basement where a pipe had burst, up to a second-floor shelving and staging area for future processing. The full-time workers at the archives have T-shirts printed up, calling themselves the “CF&I Box Monkeys.” Other Tutt Library staff alphabetized medical records, made inventory lists from boxes full of files, and other first-pass archival processing functions.

The archives recently received an NEH grant for almost a quarter of a million dollars. These archives are a rich source for Colorado history, labor history, industrial and economic history and the like. There is so much work to be done there–being an archivist there must be such a challenge. I’m sure some days it is exhilarating, with so much potential. Other days must be discouraging when contemplating the sheer amount of work to be done, or the condition of some of the materials (Jay told us of “the pit,” an open area in the steel mill where hundreds of ledger books were tossed, exposed to the elements).

It was fun, fascinating, and inspiring for me to see such a different operation than the library of a small, private liberal arts college.

Tags: steel, archives, pueblo