Unsinkable Molly Brown’s Legacy Lives On...

Unsinkable Molly Brown used to live here. She’s the lady who refused to go down with the Titanic. In a sense her spirit lives on.

Leadville has endured booms and busts through much of its history, living as it has off the precious fruits of the earth--gold, silver and lately molybdenum, which is used to strengthen steel.

But the latest bust threatened to undo everything in this gutsy city.

Climax Molybdenum laid off more than a third of the town’s workers. Then the Environmental Protection Agency eyed the 2,000 waste dumps and declared the town a Superfund cleanup site. It said it feared that lead would poison Leadville’s children.

Now Leadville seems to be coming back.

“Three years ago 250 homes were for sale. Today there are maybe 20. A three-bedroom house that went for $75,000 last year now is $100,000,” said John Ozzello, director of social services for Lake County.

Alcoholism and child abuse exploded in 1987 when 3,000 miners lost their jobs. Now those two social barometers are going down.

“There’s been a real attitude change,” Ozzello said.

“The closure of Climax would have killed a lesser town,” said Grant Dunham, editor of the weekly Herald Democrat.

That wasn’t all Leadville had to face.

The town contests the EPA’s pollution warning, but the stigma turned some investors away.

There were rescue attempts which even in disaster the town would not accept. It turned down gambling. And it turned down an offer from a machine-gun maker to build a factory.

Lake County, meanwhile, found itself using its dwindling tax base to provide welfare, day care and medical care for seasonal workers who found jobs but no housing at Vail and Copper Mountain.

Leadville’s ups have been as high as any mining town. It once boasted 40,000 people. A gold strike lasted about as long as the Civil War. The discovery of carbonate ore rich in lead and silver fueled another boom.

When the country dropped the silver standard in 1893, 90% of Leadville was jobless. The next year a vein of gold so rich it paid a million dollars in dividends was found in the Little Jonny lead and silver mine.

Molly Brown--whose name actually was Maggie--was married to James Joseph Brown, the man who figured out how to get it out. She was a shameless self-promoter who loved publicity--and almost certainly would have loved Meredith Willson’s hit Broadway musical based on her life, and MGM’s 1964 movie that followed. In a bit of poetic license, Willson changed her name.

She survived the 1912 sinking of the luxury liner Titanic, which struck an iceberg and went down, taking 1,513 people with it. There weren’t enough lifeboats, but Maggie/Molly managed to get into one. According to legend, the only man in the lifeboat was the ship’s quartermaster, who insisted that rowing was futile because the suction of the sinking ship would pull them down. Brown reputedly grabbed an oar, told another woman to help her, and saved everyone in the lifeboat.

Her by-then estranged husband did not attribute her feat to heroism, however. “She’s too mean to sink,” he groused.

The Climax mine, which became the world’s biggest producer of the steel-strengthener molybdenum, opened in 1918 and was a fairly stable base until 1987.

Now Western Colorado’s economy is heating up again due to an influx of people fleeing urban areas.

Climax reopened its molybdenum mine, on a very small scale, in April, offering jobs that pay twice tourism-industry wages, with full benefits.

The little available housing in the high country (Leadville’s elevation is 10,000 feet) was quickly bought up.

Middle-income residents of Summit County, facing skyrocketing housing prices, began buying homes here. After all, they already live above 9,000 feet, and face equally fierce winters.

Scott and Susan Brackett moved here from Blue River, just south of Breckenridge, and are spending $2 million to renovate the Delaware Hotel, built in 1886. They’re expecting to have a full house of tourists all summer.

They also are expecting the commercial district to be removed from Superfund status within the next year.

Susan Brackett says their hardest task has been keeping good help.

Directly across the street, in what used to be the atrium of Horace Tabor’s Grand Hotel, Tom Loeber and Michelle Watts of Arlington, Tex., have opened what may be the most elegant coffee shop in Colorado. The hotel’s old walk-in safe stands behind the counter.

“We have a great local following. The tourists are the icing on the cake,” Watts said.

Loeber said the town’s rebirth “was bound to happen.”

Locals, ranging from miners to construction workers, gather under walls hung with paintings by local artists.

“I remember when there was nobody here but pigeons,” said Gloria Cheshier of the Leadville Chamber of Commerce.

County Commissioner Jim Martin, a former Leadville mayor, said the housing market has picked up so much a new building inspector has been hired to deal with anticipated summer construction. Sales tax revenue was up 17% last year.

Martin listened and kept smiling when the assessor stepped into his office to tell him the assessment on his home would be going up 22%.

“If Vail and Copper Mountain don’t have enough employees next season, it’s not our problem,” Ozzello said.

Carl Miller, director of the National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum, who worked at Climax for 27 years and spent 12 years as a county commissioner, said, “We ought to be thankful the ski industry was there to help us through tough times. This may be a wake-up call for them.”

He added, “This has always been a mining town at heart. We never let it become a tinsel town.”