Episode 50: Chris Albrecht, Golden Colorado, "Where the West Lives"

In this episode, Anne Marie talks to history geek, storyteller, and tour operator, Chris Albrecht about Golden Colorado's history, The town that almost became the capital of Colorado.

Chris says, "there’s no better way to get to know a city than having a local teach you about it through stories.  You can also get great recommendations for things to do, when to do them, and the places to avoid." So when he moved to Golden, Colorado, and realized there wasn't a guided history tour available in the historic wild west town at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, he decided to start his own tour company, Golden History Tours.

Chris tells some well-crafted stories about Golden, its early days as a town during the second half of the nineteenth century, and some of the historical characters and events that helped make the town what it is today.

Find out more about Chris Albrecht and Golden History Tours:
https://www.goldenhistorytours.com/more

Golden Colorado, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden,_Colorado

Buffalo Bill Museum & Grave: https://www.buffalobill.org

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Transcript

Anne Marie Cannon: 0:00

Hello, my name is Anne Marie Cannon and I'm the host of armchair historians. What's your favorite history? Each episode begins with this one question. Our guests come from all walks of life. YouTube celebrities, comedians, historians, even neighbors from the small mountain community that I live in. There are people who love history and get really excited about a particular time, place or person from our distance or not so distant past. The jumping off point is the place where they became curious that entered the rabbit hole into discovery. Fueled by an unrelenting need to know more, we look at history through the filter of other people's eyes. armchair historians is a Belgian rabbit production. Stay up to date with us through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Wherever you listen to your podcast. That is where you'll find us. I'm chair historians as an independent, commercial free podcast. If you'd like to support the show and keep it ad free, you can buy us a cup of coffee through coffee, or you can become a patron through Patreon links to both in the Episode Notes. Hello, fellow armchair historians. In this episode, I talk to history geek storyteller and tour operator Chris Albrecht, about the history of golden Colorado, the town that almost became the permanent capital of the state. Chris says there's no better way to get to know a city than having a local teach you about it through stories, you can also get great recommendations for things to do when to do them and the places to avoid. So when he moved to golden Colorado, and realize there were no guided tours available in the wild west town situated at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, he decided to start his own tour company, golden Western tours. Chris tell some well crafted stories about golden in its early days as a town during the second half of the 19th century. And some of the historical characters and events that helped make the town what it is today. Chris Albrecht, welcome, and thank you for being here today.

Chris Albrecht: 2:14

Thanks for having me, Henry. I'm very excited to talk a little history with a fellow history buff, especially local history.

Anne Marie Cannon: 2:20

I'm excited to hear your favorite history that you're going to be talking about today. So why don't you tell me what that is?

Chris Albrecht: 2:27

Sure. I have been digging a lot recently into kind of the origin stories, if you will, around Denver and golden. I'm based out of golden. So I started looking up a lot of the history just on the street signs and the plaques that the History Museum in the city had put around town. And I thought it was really fascinating. And I thought there's got to be more to it. So the further I've been digging in, oh my gosh, the crazy stuff that happened when these towns were first coming together. I think a lot of people don't realize we were right there on the forefront of that gold rush that wild west push right around the mid 1800s.

Anne Marie Cannon: 3:06

So for people who don't know, why don't you tell us where golden Colorado is in relation to Denver?

Chris Albrecht: 3:15

Yeah. So Denver sits just outside the Front Range of the Rockies on the plains. They're almost bought up against it. And then golden is about 12 miles east, literally right on the foothills. And we're sort of nestled in there between the first row the Front Range and a few table mountains. So we're tucked in in our own little cozy pocket, sort of separated from Denver, but still right down the road,

Anne Marie Cannon: 3:39

I know that you have to tell the history of Denver, along with the history of golden so that we understand. So you go ahead and just say it the way that you think would be most helpful to my listeners? Sure. Yeah,

Chris Albrecht: 3:52

they do go hand in hand. So I learned that as I was listening to some stories being told about golden that you really couldn't ignore what happened in Denver, one led to the other. So really, when you go back to it, we have to thank California for getting here because it was the 1849 gold rush in California that sent the 40 Niners sweeping across what was known as the Great American desert at the time, the Great Plains, and the few of them that stopped off in the middle because many of them were taking the northern route the Oregon Trail, some of them took the southern route along the Santa Fe Trail, but those who came right through the middle on their way to California, I discovered some creeks and streams coming out of the mountains here that were producing little bits of gold. And it was that interest that kind of spurred everybody on once the gold rush in California started to dry up. So there was a group in particular, the green rustle party, William green Russell had tried his hand in California had gone back to Georgia but discovered a few dollars in gold along the way and some of those stream beds just outside of the Rockies. So he organized another party to come back and found a few dollars here and there, there really wasn't a tremendous amount of gold down in the plains at the base of the mountains. But there was a lot of money back then that could be made by starting a town. This was a really tricky thing to do at this time, though, because in 1858 1859, when people were starting to settle right around here, think about what was happening with the rest of the country. We were in the middle of a big civil uprising, the Civil War about to begin. So when gold was discovered, and they were starting these towns, we didn't get a lot of help from the federal government, they had their own their own problems they were dealing with on the eastern side of the country. And so that's really what drew out the wild west part of it. So there's some fun stories about how these towns actually came to be. There were a few people who did try their hand up in the mountains and found a few substantial gold strikes. And john Gregory was one of them, just before him, George Jackson. So before I tell you about them before I tell you about Gregory and Jackson, because they are directly tied to Golden One. I have too many fun stories going through my head. I can't pick out which ones I want to tell first.

Anne Marie Cannon: 6:12

Well, you know, it really you set it up? Good. It was the Wild West. And the last time I spoke to you, I thought about that in the fact that the government was tied up. And so people were creating these living arrangements, and they had to come up with their own way of having lawn orders. I think that's a very interesting point that you raise.

Chris Albrecht: 6:37

Yeah, I mean, so at the very beginning at that group, William green Russell's group, they came up through Cherry Creek and landed where Cherry Creek runs right into the South Platte River. At that Confluence, they started one town called St. Charles on the eastern banks of Cherry Creek. The way they started, it was it was sort of a privately owned company, the St. Charles town company. And people would buy into that like private stock. If you wanted to be part of the town you would pay into it. And that was kind of their way of collecting money and putting the town together. But if you did not want to participate in that you couldn't be within their self drawn town limits. So as people began flooding in, there's another group that started their own town just on the other side of the creek on the western banks of Cherry Creek. And this was William Larimer, General Larimer, his son and a few others. They started the town of Earth area. They started their own town or area was named after the Georgians who came into town. So we had our area on one side, St. Charles on the other. And then in that november of 1858, William Larimer and his Kansas folk came in our area was sort of the free town you didn't have to pay dues into it. Anyone could just set up camp and become part of the town and work together. But Larimer in his group, realizing that when they came in November, and found the town of St. Charles had basically been abandoned because that was that group had gone back to the eastern side of the Kansas territory to get the paperwork written up to establish and charter their town man named Mugu was supposed to be guarding it for them. He claims that the Larimer has got him well drunk on whiskey and convinced him to move aside as they took over the half finished town of St. Charles a lot of empty buildings and half constructed cabins. So when the St. Charles folks came back there with Lammers occupying their new town basically claimed jumped him. And it said that Larimer held up a noose in front of the proprietors of that town and told them, do you really want to fight over this and they realize they were outnumbered and at that point, the whole thing was over. So they lost the town of St. Charles and Larimer in an attempt to try and curry a little favor with the territorial governor, because at that time, we were still the Kansas territory. They named it after him. And that was James Denver at the time. And so that's how we got the name Denver. What they didn't realize, however, was that Governor Denver had left office three months earlier, he had no power anymore to actually do anything for us. But the name stuck. So we had a rarey on one side, Denver city on the other. And over time, Denver city would come to basically annex or area and bring it all under one name as the town grew stronger over the years. So this is an 18 1858 so that was that was how the town of Denver started we were a claim jump by a threatening bunch of Kansans. Okay, right there. Yeah, you can't trust them. But yeah, that's how the town got started. And it was all started on the basis of gold. Now, at least these groups are finding bits, you know, some flakes here, a little bit of gold dust gold powder, or what they would call flower gold. You know, because you got rocks, you've got nuggets, you've got flakes, and then you get down to this purple. How to Read. It's almost like a baking flour and it's extremely difficult and expensive to get out of the ground, and usually not worth the effort it takes you're wasting more money than you're earning. So they had basically exhausted any sort of gold findings on the banks of those creeks down at the base of the mountains. But that's when all these other little towns started springing up all over the place. And Golden City was one of those just 12 miles to the west of Denver. So when we get out there, there's a little bit fewer people, but there were one little town in particular that was just on the eastern side of South Table Mountain, one of those two tables that kind of Nestle's golden into a little pocket. They named that town, Arapaho city after one of the local Native American tribes. And that was our jumping off point for those people who are coming into town who are going to try their hand up in the mountains. And that's where we get to George Jackson and john Gregory. So Jackson was the first one. He and a few people actually followed Clear Creek up into the mountains in 1859. In the spring, the winter and spring before anyone else got up there. I can't imagine what he was thinking it was cold it was snowpack, it was icy, he actually had to build fires over the blank the frozen banks of the creek to try and melt through to get fresh water and to extract any sort of sediment that he might be able to sluice out in his pan and took a few tries, but they eventually did find gold up in the hills. On their way back down. They stopped off for a bit of lunch. Jackson was trying to catch some trout and Clear Creek while his buddy Tom was up on the banks starting a fire to cook him. And what Clear Creek did for us. For a town I always say the creek giveth and the creek taketh away. There's about a 500 square mile watershed that feeds the creek. So when the snow is melting, it runs really high. It was doing the same in 1859. You get a good rainstorm on top of that, and then you get flash flooding and Jackson happen to get swept away in a flash flood on his way back down to resupply. Now his friend Tom was sitting up there on the banks of the creek watched the whole thing go down. Now, I usually tell this on the tours that I give around golden this story I do a little bit more exaggerated version of this. But I always ask people, what do you think Jackson's friend Tom was doing? Or thinking at this point while he watches his friend get swept away in a flash flood, realizing he's the only other person who knows where the gold is in the mountains that they found. And I think that the answer is usually Well, I hope he saved his friend's life. But I don't think he did think you followed the map back up. But he did actually save George Jackson's life, the two men made it back down. And the valley where golden sits today was unoccupied. At the time. Not even the Native Americans who considered it a sacred area were living in the valley. But when they came back down, they found the people that started to set up the semblances of a small town here another one. So a group of some miners and some businessmen all got together, chartered the town of golden Colorado or at that time golden, Kansas territory. But the name they gave it is not after the mineral they named it after Thomas golden the man who saved his buddy George Jackson's life that day on the way down the creek. So there's your trivia fact for your listeners today. Golden was named after the man not the mineral so if you ever come and take a tour now, you know,

Anne Marie Cannon: 13:32

now I know. So where did they find the gold? Was it above golden or like in that area, that general area the

Chris Albrecht: 13:39

first gold strike was on the southern fork of Clear Creek today, we know that this Chicago Creek and the town that sprung up there is Idaho springs, okay. And it was john Gregory who came down to try his hand after Jackson. He followed the creek up and took the North Fork, and he discovered what we know today as the richest square mile on Earth. Hundreds of millions of dollars of gold came out of that out of the Gregory diggings up there. And today we know that as central city and Blackhawk,

Anne Marie Cannon: 14:07

they really did find gold up there in that area. In the 1800s.

Chris Albrecht: 14:11

They did there was enough gold up there to start the people swarming. But it was such a dishonest way of doing it. Because there's a lot of there's a lot of money to be made by starting these towns and you wanted people you needed an economy. And that's where the businessmen the people who came to mind the miners were making their money. And they use some really devious and underhanded methods to do this. There's a few people involved in all of this once the gold was found, you know, the two major diggings were producing all of it, but everyone thought they could get their hands on their own because once word got out back east, that there was actually gold up in them there hills, they were sending newspaper reporters out to interview the people who were setting up these towns and talk to the mine owners. So you had people like Horace Greeley from the New York Tribune coming out, and he was writing back in 18 59 about the conditions in the camps and how prolific all these mines are because what they would do is find a couple of the producing mines borrow a bit of gold and seed, the ones that weren't producing. So when the newspaper men came to write about it, there was gold in every mine in Colorado, all you had to do is put a shovel in the ground and you could be rich. So that convinced a lot of people to make their way out here. As long as you weren't listening too closely to the wave of people who went the wrong direction, the go backers. We had quite a few of those.

Anne Marie Cannon: 15:34

So there was a lot of that where they were trying to sell it this Gold's paradise to people. Bakkies to bring them out here.

Chris Albrecht: 15:46

They were selling it hard. In fact, William buyers who started the Rocky Mountain news on the second floor of an old saloon in 1859. His paper the Rocky Mountain news was colloquially known back east as the Rocky Mountain liar. Because of all the falsehoods he was posting, trying to lure people out at one point even saying that it was easy transport you didn't need to risk your life on a wagon over the plains, you could flow to steamboat right up the Platte River. Now, if you've ever been to Denver, you can't you can barely get a canoe up the Platte River in winter, let alone a steamboat. Not a chance. But he had he developed quite the reputation for himself back east with the with his paper.

Anne Marie Cannon: 16:30

Were they successful in their shyster?

Chris Albrecht: 16:33

Oh, yes, I absolutely. They estimated at that time. For every person who was actually working in the mines, you needed about five people to support the town that was supporting them, because you needed to have a blacksmith, a dentist who coincidentally but also be your doctor and your dentist, which is just terrifying to me. don't particularly want my hairstylist giving me a root canal. But then you also had, you know, Sheriff, your grocery store workers, your produce your farmers, it took a lot of people to run a town. So that's really where the money could be made. And by 1862, we had the Homestead Act, the federal government would give you 160 acres for free as long as you put a fence around it and put a home on it or did some sort of improvement to it. So that in addition was causing a lot of people to flood out to the west who just wanted to make a new life for themselves in these new towns that were springing up whether or not they were going to work in the coal mines, the gold mines or not.

Anne Marie Cannon: 17:32

So were their homesteads on the outskirts of the town that was laid out of golden

Chris Albrecht: 17:39

there were people setting up ranches and farms and lots of smaller towns that aren't around at all today, they either got subsumed or fell apart, all over the place around here. In fact, there's I always wondered about this until I finally looked it up. There is a small park right next to I 70 in the foothills as you're driving up into the mountains called Apex Park. It's a bunch of single track trails, you have a lot of runners, hikers, mountain bikers out there, but they have signs along the trails that tell you what the toll is to use the paths. And I'm looking at these The first time I go up there and think why is there a toll to use these paths? And where do I put it, there's no box to collect it. And I finally realized it must be something historic. It must be like a throwback. And it is those were the first wagon trails up connecting the towns just to the west of us just up west of golden even the town of Mount Vernon with the town's down in the hills. So they were putting up homesteads everywhere around here. Whoever was operating and maintaining the wagon trails up into the hills was charging tolls for that. So who owned what is hard to say? Because at that time, nothing was really legal because we weren't getting any help from baggies.

Anne Marie Cannon: 18:58

Right. That's the thing. So when they laid out these towns, even Georgetown, I still don't quite understand how they did it. But how does it become legal entity like the town of golden.

Chris Albrecht: 19:12

So you'd have to go talk to the at that time, who would be the governor of your territory, and they would have to sign papers to incorporate or you know, charter a town define the limits, I guess I'm not sure exactly what the details are to go into that but there has to be paperwork filed with the whatever governing body is there. And well around this time 1859 1860 we want it to become our own territory. We were tired of being you know, this loosely formed edge of Kansas. So they actually drew up the Jefferson territory illegally. Nobody back east would you know return we're not we're getting phone calls back from them. are busy with their own stuff. So

Anne Marie Cannon: 20:01

that would be really weird.

Chris Albrecht: 20:04

But yeah, we didn't have telegraph lines at this time. So it was a pony express was just about to get started. So you were going by stagecoach to try and send correspondence back and forth. But they just drew this gigantic square cutting off part of Nebraska part of Kansas, a big chunk of Wyoming and a big chunk of New Mexico, and said, We're the Jefferson territory, we're making up our own damn rules. And they did quite illegally made up our own rules, our own boundaries, declared it ours. And eventually 1861, Kansas would become a state, and then draw a boundary there. And they took this Jefferson territory gave a little bit back to what would become Wyoming a little bit back to what would become New Mexico, and drew the square in to the dimensions that we know Colorado today. And from a number of different recommendations across the state, people were being asked to volunteer options for naming What do we call this, they eventually took Jefferson down to Jefferson County, where golden is situated golden being the seat of the county. There you go. And then they in Colorado after Colorado city became the winning vote to name our new territory that we would get in 1862. Colorado is a Spanish word that means colored red. So for the sandstone and the red deserts and things to the south of us. That's where that name comes from. But that was the winning name when they decided to officially create a territory for us out here. And we got no I didn't know. You're just I am I love this stuff. I do too. Yeah, that's that's how we came around. And the rules and the laws were all started by the mining camps, you know, back then we didn't have we weren't getting the paperwork, the assistance, the governance from anywhere else. So the mining camps actually had the first written rules of any law in the area. And it was considered to be at legal legally binding at that time, things like, if you were caught stealing, or you know, stealing from somebody else in the camp, you'd be forced to repay that plus interest. If you were, you know, if you step that up a notch, you can be banished and exiled from the camp, all the mining camps had written rules, they all agreed upon them. If you did something really egregious, you could be hanged by by their charters. But those were the rules that we had. And those rules sort of trickled into the towns as they were being set up. Even if they weren't mining towns, which is effectively what golden became, we never found gold, you know, more than a few dollars worth in the town that became golden. But we became that support town, that depot town as people were heading up the creek into the gold fields. So we adopted a lot of those rules and laws from the miners, until something more formal that matched more closely with what the rest of the country was doing could be established

Anne Marie Cannon: 22:57

after the Civil War. What happens after the Civil War? Are people coming into Colorado and golden specifically and staying or are they just passing through golden,

Chris Albrecht: 23:12

we had a lot of people come out and stay, a few people were still on their way up to the mountains, and then we'd have post Gold Rush boom, the Gold Rush boom was mainly the 1860s. Once it was pretty well played out, and people realize they weren't finding any more gold strikes up in the mountains. We were settling a lot in the town. But there were a few people still prospecting and we had the booms that would follow the silver boom, obviously putting places like Georgetown and Leadville on the map, and then you get people coming through again. And that would drive the industry a little stronger, we'd have the railroads now being a major component in that, you know, the first railroad entered the borders of the Colorado territory around 1867, up in julesburg, along the South Platte River, and then would make its way into Denver by 1868, and into golden by 1870. And by 1872, connected boulder and all the mountain towns as well. So quickly, within a few years now we had this major infrastructure connecting everything that sort of solidified us put us on the map thanks to people like William Loveland. He's colloquial, that is a hard word to say. He's known around golden as the prince of pioneers because he brought so much money in and really staked golden out to be the, you know, the capital the town. And that's, that's actually what we were, is the original capital of the territory back in 1862. To 1867. For five years golden was the capital.

Anne Marie Cannon: 24:46

I didn't know.

Chris Albrecht: 24:47

Now I always say that we are the first capital the original capital before Denver stole it from us in 1867. That's not 100% true because Colorado city down just now it's part of Colorado Springs. But then it was its own small town. Just it's on the western suburbs of Colorado Springs today at the base of Pikes Peak. They nominated that to be the first capital way down there. Even though there was a lot more industry popping up around the Denver region, they nominated it, the first people who ever showed up there to have any sort of meetings realized it was nothing more than a ramshackle blog building with a dirt floor that smelled terrible. Like they never actually had any meetings there. It was labeled as the capital city for the territory, the unofficial Jefferson territory for a while, like four months, no one ever met there, and they decided to move it up to golden. So once everyone realized that the railroads were coming through the 1860s, that's when Denver stepped up and said, We'd like to be the Capitol now. Because those railroads bring a lot of money, a lot of people a lot of Industry and Commerce. But golden said, Well, you can't just be the cattle. We're the capital, you can't just have it. But the legislators realizing that there was potential here decided to hold an election, and the vote passed by one single vote to move the capital from golden to Denver.

Anne Marie Cannon: 26:20

Incredible, wow.

Chris Albrecht: 26:22

What's more incredible is that the person who cast the deciding vote was a golden backer the whole time. But for some strange reason, changed his vote to Denver at the last minute. Now, he got called out pretty heavily in the local papers for this. You can imagine what might have happened what what would cause an upstanding citizen to change his mind and betray his town like that certain little green colored paper with pictures of presidents on them have tend to persuade people's opinions but

Anne Marie Cannon: 26:57

follow the money. That's

Chris Albrecht: 26:59

so we like to say Denver stole the capital from us. But it was people like William Loveland, Edward birth ID, George West, the pioneers that settled the town that brought the business and the money to us, you know, together, they were responsible for the newspapers and the railroads. That kept us going. They fought hard for it. In fact, William Loveland, and the reason that these names are gonna sound a little familiar to people in the area, William Loveland. He brought the money he brought the business he started the Colorado and southern rail line headquartered in Golden even though Denver took the capital from us. He wasn't giving up on his town. So having started the railroad company here, that provided the lifeblood for the town, and he fought to get the railroad coming through golden up to the mountains, because they were talking about bypassing us completely. And just going up the Mount Vernon Canyon today. That's why 70 goes up through the mat, the mountains, but he convinced them to come through golden, which without that we really wouldn't be where we are today. So William Loveland was the brain or the money behind it, the business behind it. And he hired a local engineer named Edward Bertha had to devise a way to get the narrow gauge rail line through golden up into the mountains to connect well, us to you up there in Georgetown. And because of that, because of the railroads that he brought into the Front Range, each man has a town named after him to the north of us between here in Fort Collins, and then each man has a mountain pass named after him to the west birthday pass in Loveland pass. So that's how instrumental they were

Anne Marie Cannon: 28:28

Loveland passes right above the town that I live in, which is Georgetown.

Chris Albrecht: 28:34

Yep. And then birth had passed, connects up over into the Winter Park range up there. Yes. So William Loveland, was the business Edward birth. It was the engineer who got the railroads up into the mountains. But the railroad itself went up through Georgetown. And that's the Georgetown loop that we have today is the original rail line that connected the plains to the mountains. Yeah. Oh, if you want to start getting into railroad history, we're going to be here all day. That is, oh, man, that that was such a mess of people selling railroad that didn't actually have any supplies to build it. They were just taking advantage of people and so many different honors and

Anne Marie Cannon: 29:13

they only got like halfway through the tunnel. They never finished it. The Moffitt turnoff,

Chris Albrecht: 29:19

I think I think they got the tunnel through but originally that was supposed to connect Denver with salt lake city and he got as far as Craig before he ran out of money. Okay, yeah. Oh, man. There's so many stories around all of that. There sure is.

Anne Marie Cannon: 29:35

So at what point is golden realize it's not actually a mining town? How is it transformed and what does it become?

Chris Albrecht: 29:46

I mean, golden realized that it wasn't a gold mining town right away. It was definitely established as the depot town. But there was a lot of other mining that was happening here, just not for gold. So I'm gonna throw some more fun facts. Because I just love these, and I'm full of them. So during the 1870s and 1880s, we were mining coal. And we found because of all the geologic uplift for the Rocky Mountains, a massive coal seam that runs, they estimate about four to five miles along the front range between golden and Boulder. And because about 1000 feet down, it's almost perfectly vertical. And so the coal miners were digging these immensely deep mine shafts into the ground, and then arms off those shafts to extract the coal. And at one point, the white ash coal mine operating in Golden was the deepest coal mine in the country, so prolific.

Anne Marie Cannon: 30:41

I did not know that.

Chris Albrecht: 30:43

Yep, so the coal was a big one. So we were mining coal. The other thing that we were pulling out of the ground, and around here was clay. That clay was used in all sorts of things, but primarily in bricks and porcelain. So the golden brick works, there were a number of different operations that were producing bricks for years, up until the 1920s, and 30s. And it was such good business for us that we were actually shipping around the world, we were shipping bricks from golden to China, Japan, all over for their infrastructure needs. So that's how much clay we were pulling out here. But it was around the turn of the century, that a different person in town decided that clay could be used for porcelain. So a few people were starting small porcelain companies and golden, nothing big, just local stuff. But when we stopped receiving our porcelain imports from Europe, during World War One, people were starting to freak out, we need to have our fancy China sets and dishware and dinner plates. So a man in town realizing that the US was in a bit of turmoil, World War One, and then not long, after that we're gonna we're actually during that Colorado would see prohibition, seeing the signs coming, head off course, bought up these little porcelain companies and started his own porcelain company, and was producing porcelain for the people all around the country all around golden. And that porcelain company would later go on to produce electrical insulators and components because porcelain is an fantastic electrical insulator. So that vertical of the cores operation is one of the main reasons they were able to stay soluble during Prohibition.

Anne Marie Cannon: 32:33

Okay, very interesting, huh? That is fascinating.

Chris Albrecht: 32:38

Yeah. So that today, of course, tech is still in operation. That's their pourcel. Inside, they do somewhere between eight and $900 million a year in revenue for the Corps. You know, as a chorus company, there is Kors porcelain used on the International Space Station. And kind of a shady side of this, the chorus brothers, the third generation who are operating the business at the time, didn't realize what the porcelain was being used for when they shipped it to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and later would come to find out, they were using that porcelain in developments of the first atomic bomb. So of course, porcelain was responsible for what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whoa, or at least partially responsible? Yeah,

Anne Marie Cannon: 33:24

yeah. Yeah. No, I hear you. That is interesting. So golden, is quite a place. There's, it seems to have a lot of different industries throughout the years. Well, I guess I want to know how you got interested in it. And then what did you do with this? Tell us what you do, which is a really good example about how much you love talking about.

Chris Albrecht: 33:51

Yeah, I mean, I've always loved learning. And trivia has always been a lot of fun for me, obviously, I'm just stuffed with fun, ridiculous facts about the history around here. So always having that fascination. And it's funny because I was actually terrible at history in school, you know, if you could have just given me a timeline, it would have been so much better. But I don't know why that my history teachers always insisted on just talking about events and then expecting my brain to put them in chronological order, just by verbatim. I'm like, I doesn't work that way. In any case. Yeah, history was not my best subject in school, but I always loved the Wild West era, you know, like, out of the Back to the Future series. Probably gonna get a lot of flack for saying this. But the third one was my favorite. I just loved that idea and concept of being on the forefront. So and I also love touring, my wife and I, when we travel will look for different tours to take. And no matter what they are. I mean, there's great ones in places like Salem, Massachusetts, oh my gosh, the the tour, obviously, is something to take up there because of what happened with the witch trials. But there's more to it than just that too. And I won't give away any of their tour secrets, but Milton Bradley came from there. There's some cool things to see up there. In any case, we moved into the town of golden itself about three years ago and said, well, let's go take the tour. And the only tours that were happening at that time were summer and autumn ghost tours at night, which were a lot of fun. But when you walk around golden, especially downtown golden, the city and historical museum has done, they've done such an amazing job of preserving and advertising the history with plaques on all the buildings and all along the bridge, different pieces of history that all come together. And so as I'm reading these, and like, there's so much here, why is nobody doing these tours, the only one you could take other than the ghost tours was a self guided one that the visitor center put together, the museum put together where you could pull it up on your phone and follow along and read about little bits of it. But how much more fun is it to have a tour guide who can point out the local spots that the low you know how to live like a local, like, where to go, that's off the tourist path, you know, so I decided that I was going to take my love for random trivia knowledge. And basically at this point, I had learned so much about golden itself, that we have friends come out to visit, they would get to a point where they just had to tell me to shut up like, Hey, did you know that about it? Yes, yes, we knew that about just Can we stop with the history lesson, please. And so I realized, I might be able to get people to pay me to do this and have some fun with it at the same time and start a little side gig. So I decided to start my own tour company, and researched as many of the facts and dates and then I turn those into the stories that's really what got to be fun for me is that it's not just Hey, that buildings really old, or this used to be that and now it's this. It's the stories of the people behind it. So I've spent a lot of time looking through books and talking to historians and getting newsletters and we have some really dedicated and knowledgeable historians in town that are sharing their, their information for free. And I got to give all the credit to them. But then taking those stories and telling them you know, true storyteller fashion, not just reciting dates and facts through these tours, and that has grown over the last two years now started it two years ago. And I've got a one hour and two hour just walking tour through town where I'll tell you the stories and give you the history. We can do a pub crawl version of that where we go to three local microbreweries. And you get to hear about how those breweries got started the types of people that are running the businesses and have a beer and I'll tell you stories while you're trying some local beers. And then now I'm also doing golden ghosts and spirits haunted pub crawl. Yeah. So that when we go out at night, and we stop at a couple of places, some haunted buildings along the way and tell you the stories about the hauntings and some of the seedier sides of golden that we've dug up because obviously being at the forefront of the Wild West and the edge of that frontier, without the institution of government, it was well, you were largely on your own.

Anne Marie Cannon: 38:03

Have you had any experiences when you're doing your ghost tours, your

Chris Albrecht: 38:07

ghost crawl on my tour itself. And I think I always tell people, when we start the ghost tour, some people are more open to experiencing things than others. I've experienced a couple of things in my life that I have a really hard time explaining. I've also seen photos that people have sent me after taking the tours because I encourage people to take photos at certain spots. Some are really easy to pick out like yeah, that's the headlights that from that car driving down the road. And then there's some that go I I can't explain what that is to you. That looks like there's somebody looking out that window, but all the doors and windows are locked. Yeah. So I've had a lot of second hand experiences. I don't think I'm particularly like one of those people who's more open to those experiences I want to be and I definitely believe in that. But I've had a few things happen even outside of that, like hearing footsteps walking across the floor, and then there's nobody there. I'm the only one in the building. You know, I've had some creepy experiences like that. But I've definitely had people experience some things on the tour that go beyond explanation, rational explanation.

Anne Marie Cannon: 39:09

Why is this history important?

Chris Albrecht: 39:12

I believe you can't know where you're going. If you don't know where you came from. For me, there's a couple of reasons for it. It's important to know the background of where you're at, at least to some degree how Colorado came to be. We didn't just appear here. In fact, the the events that led up to white people to settlers being in this area are pretty atrocious when you go back and read through those, you know, and I skipped over all that in this interview like the atrocities that were taking place throughout the country that allowed us to be and remain here understanding that puts things in such a different perspective. And it's like if you try and draw a line to the future, and you have one dot that line can go anywhere. How do you know what to do and how not to repeat it. That's the other quote. Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. I don't think I have that exactly right. But Sounds good. It's Yeah, the the sentiments there, you know, we don't want to have another get kind of gruesome and dark here, but a holocaust or the genocide of the Native Americans, you have to understand all of that, to really understand what makes us who we are. So, you know, on its deepest level, there's that I think that's why it's important to know the history. on another level, it's to, especially when we travel, when I take tours, I feel like I know the town and I understand the culture so much better. Even after taking a short tour a one hour or a two hour tour, you understand why that town? Is there, how it got to be there, the events that led up to it, but now I can walk around that town and know, what are the businesses to go check out, because the tour guide has given me those secret local insider tips, who the people are, in general, you know, I think that's really important is when you travel, you can follow guidebooks or you can pull out Google and try and do it on your own. But being a tour guide, and knowing the history, Mabel, being able to share that with people, gives them gives people who are visiting a different respect for your town and your history and your culture. So that's why I like to do that and share that with the people who are visiting.

Anne Marie Cannon: 41:07

Well, it's more intimate that way. I have a tour business and I get to know people on a deeper level, and they get to know my town on a deeper level. And so it's a given tape. It's like a dance almost. But yeah, I agree with you. I think that it is important to I'm a history geek. Of course, I think that but I like to know the history of a place as well. And I like the way that you, you know, the different levels that you explained. I think that's really profound. So yeah, I'm right there with you, my friend. Do we see this history in pop culture,

Chris Albrecht: 41:43

the precise characters themselves, you don't see too much. I mean, if you wanted to look into movies and TV shows, there are a couple of old westerns that I forgot to go and look up the names of them. They're very hard to find. But they did film a couple of westerns back in the 30s and 40s. Maybe I think it is around or in Golden, but nobody recognizable not like a john wayne. And then there was a particular there was a TV show that filmed an episode here in the in the 60s, you can see the big golden arch in the background as they go driving down the road. So there's a few things like that the biggest name that you would see in Golden, you know, probably outside of course, there would have to be Buffalo Bill. Now, Buffalo Bill never actually lived in Golden. But he spent time in Denver, he had family in Denver, and took his wild west show all over. I mean, all over the world. Even though Denver and Colorado were the Wild West, we're on the forefront of that. When he was touring through the 1880s 1890s, his show still came to these wild west towns that were you know, only a few decades removed from the stories he was telling. At the end of his life. He grew ill he was up in Glenwood Springs, and came down to Denver lived the rest of his days with his sister, who was living in Denver. before he passed, he said that he wanted to be buried somewhere where he could look out over the plains that he loved. And golden was the natural choice for that. So there are a few spots that were recommended. But ultimately, they chose Lookout Mountain, they can look down over golden that all the way out over the plains over Denver. And even on a clear day today, from up there, you can look out and actually see the airport that they put halfway out to Kansas, but it's just barely visible on the horizon. So you can really see all of it up there. And that's where he's laid to rest. So

Anne Marie Cannon: 43:35

Well, that's a big claim to fame. So if you want to pay your homage to Buffalo Bill, go to golf, and take a tour with what's the name of your tour company. Again,

Chris Albrecht: 43:46

I made it really easy for everybody to find golden history tours.

Anne Marie Cannon: 43:51

And we'll definitely link out to that in our episode notes.

Chris Albrecht: 43:55

Wonderful. Yeah, I'd love to have people out. It's a lot of fun, like I said, to tell people about that history to kind of bring them in and teach them about the town. You always feel like you own a little bit more of the town. It feels more personal once you do that. So it's great to have that reaction from people too. I love getting those responses and I get a lot of those that people really feel like they know the town's so much better. They have a better respect for it now and that's fun for me. So I look forward to tell them some more stories and walking people through town bringing up that history that buried right in front of your face sometimes,

Anne Marie Cannon: 44:25

and I'm not just saying this because I'm talking to you but when I came to Colorado about eight years ago, I was looking for a place I wanted to live in Golden golden. I love golden just where it's situated. The town itself there's a lot going on there. What can I say about that? Welcome to golden the arch there. That's very wild west. I love that we have that in our town to a golden is an amazing place and I recommend if you come to Colorado or if you live in Colorado, definitely check them out and definitely Check out Chris's tours, do you do tours in the winter,

Chris Albrecht: 45:04

I will run them year round. We do. The walking tours can usually run most of the time, we don't get tremendous amounts of snow. I've done a few where there's been a little bit of snow on the ground, but I'll do the walking tours and the the pub crawl the brewery tours as well during the winter with those, as long as the streets and sidewalks are clear, we can go find a place to sit down and tell some stories.

Anne Marie Cannon: 45:26

So are they regularly scheduled in the winter like they are in the summer a

Chris Albrecht: 45:30

little more sparse in the winter. But Yep, we'll have the calendar open. And if you're listening to this, and you want to come out, pull up the website, golden history tours calm. It's got all the regular availability on there. But you know, depending on how busy we are, and the number of tour guides that I have running, because I do have one or two others that are getting up to speed, we can do custom requests as well. So if there's a date that you're looking for that you're going to be in town or if the morning doesn't work, but the afternoon does absolutely use the form on there, email me and we can do we'll try our best to find someone to come out if there's not something listed on the calendar for you. But we do custom tours as well. If you have a company outing birthday party, for some reason, I've been getting a lot of bachelorette parties lately. Interesting people looking for something a little different to do. We can have some fun with those the pub crawl ones and the ghost tour ones are fun for that.

Anne Marie Cannon: 46:18

Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you want to share with my audience,

Chris Albrecht: 46:22

I just think, take a tour when you travel. And I know people are getting back out and traveling we're a little bit on an edge right now as COVID is evolving. But if you're out there and you can find places that are doing tours, go take a tour with somebody tour guides love doing what they do there. They love telling stories and teaching people and they'll give you all those secrets to really check out the town like a local instead of you know, don't go to the Starbucks go to this coffee shop, they'll they'll treat you right over there. It's a much better cup of coffee, tell them I sent you they'll throw in a free scone, who knows, but

Anne Marie Cannon: 46:53

you wield all that power.

Chris Albrecht: 46:56

It's funny, we first moved into the town and golden does have such a great community feel to it. I thought it's just gonna be fun to get to know people in this town, it would be great to walk into the brewery or the coffee shop and know the people that work there and greet them by name. So I thought that's what I'm going to do just introduce myself when I go around to those places. The tour guide part helps now that I've started doing that. But I do have that kind of relationship now. And it's fun to be able to walk in there and just know who's working and say hi to people and you really feel like a part of that community. And

Anne Marie Cannon: 47:26

oh yeah, I did a tour last night I did a ghost tour. There was a guy who was going to play music over at 511 rows. And he came over with his guitar and started serenading my, my Oh, how cool. Yes, I know. And I love that I love you know, just walking around town waving. I feel like the governor. I really enjoyed talking to you today. Chris, thank you so much for being here. Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me. There you have it. Chris Albrecht in Golden, Colorado. To find out more about Chris and his tours, be sure to check out our episode notes. Thanks for joining us. Have a great week.