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DEL NORTE

When gold was discovered in the San Juan Mountains in the early 1870s, mining camps sprang up near the rich strikes, and there was an immediate need for food, supplies, and equipment. Because of the mines’ remote locations, everything had to be transported by burro or mule pack trains over narrow, treacherous trails, and high mountain passes. There were no roads that could be navigated by heavily loaded freight wagons.

In 1871, the camps in the southern San Juan Mountains could be reached by a rough trail over Stony Pass. J. Cary French and some associates planned a new town that would be a supply center for the mining camps. They selected a site on the sagebrush plains near the Rio Grande del Norte River. Using a mariner’s compass, they marked off the streets and city lots, making the main street wide enough for a six-mule freight team to turn completely around.

The town was officially named “Del Norte” on October 23, 1871, and eager merchants soon began arriving with wagons of supplies for the camps. They bought lots, built their stores, and got busy making money. There was little lumber available locally for building, and the nearest sawmill was in Conejos, over fifty miles away. To avoid this long journey, most buildings in Del Norte were constructed of the tough, rhyolite stone that was quarried nearby. Many of these early stone buildings, which range from gray to light pink in color, are still in use more than a century later.

Soon, long pack trains were plodding up the Stony Pass trail, loaded with boxes of dynamite, metal ore cars, steam boilers, kegs of whiskey, quarters of beef, and even whole hogs. Long wooden planks and metal tracks for ore cars were strapped on the burros with one end sticking up in the air, and the opposite end dragging and bumping along. Planks were always cut longer than their designated length to compensate for the amount of wood that would be “dragged off ” on the trails. As the long pack trains made their way into the mountains, the metallic screech of the rails on the rocky trail blended with the burros’ resentful hee-haws. There was often little rest for the pack animals when they arrived at the camps. They were quickly unloaded, and heavy bags of ore were piled on for the difficult trip back through the mountains. Once the pack trains returned, the bags of ore were loaded into freight wagons and hauled to smelters in Pueblo and Denver.

Del Norte grew quickly, and in 1874, it became the new Rio Grande County’s administrative center. By 1881, the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad was rushing to get its tracks laid across the San Luis Valley, hoping to reach the San Juans before the winter storms began. In November, everyone celebrated when the first train chugged into Del Norte, bringing an immediate decrease in the prices of goods, supplies, and mining equipment. Now the railroad would carry ore to the smelters at a much cheaper price than the freighters.

Burro pack trains carried planks of lumber to the mines high in the mountains. Courtesy of History Colorado.

In 1881, three outlaws held up the stage from Del Norte to Silverton, but a sheriff ’s posse chased them down and captured two of the robbers. Knowing that vigilantes would be waiting with nooses for their prisoners, the sheriff and his men didn’t bring them into town until after dark. They locked the outlaws in the jail and went home. During the night, vigilantes broke into the jail, grabbed the prisoners, outfitted them with hemp neckties, and lynched them from a nearby tree. Then they returned the bodies to the jail, where the sheriff found them the next morning—both neatly tucked into their cots, dead.

During its boom, Del Norte’s population swelled to around ten thousand, and it even had an opera house and a library. In 1883, George Darby founded the Presbyterian College of the Southwest and built a small observatory on Mount Lookout, which contained the only telescope west of the Mississippi.

The Windsor Hotel was saved from demolition by Del Norte’s citizens. Courtesy of Wendy Williams.

Del Norte had several saloons, dance halls, and a red-light district. There were occasional shootings and robberies, and the citizens’ vigilante group remained very active. One night, they stormed the jail, intent upon lynching two cattle rustlers, but the intended victims escaped before the vigilantes arrived. Aggravated that their plans for a lynching had gone awry, the necktie party went on a binge, shot up the town, and didn’t sober up until they’d killed one of their own members, and wounded several others.

The farms and ranches that developed around Del Norte helped the town survive the depression of 1893 and the closure of the silver mines. Today, farms in the San Luis Valley produce potatoes, barley, and wheat, plus a malt barley that was introduced in the 1950s. Coors Beer buys carloads of this malt barley, grown just for its brewery. The valley’s rich soil has produced some spectacular vegetables, like a giant turnip that weighed twenty-one pounds.

WINDSOR HOTEL

The wrecking ball was poised, and the dynamite was ready to demolish the crumbling, old Windsor Hotel, but just a few hours before it was blasted to smithereens, the old derelict was rescued. That happened in 1993 when Dr. Raymond Culp and his wife, Barbara, saved the Del Norte landmark. After buying the hotel, the Culps set up a nonprofit organization to raise funds to rebuild the dilapidated property. Del Norte citizens joined the renovation effort, raising money, and obtaining grants from the state historical fund.

An architect and local contractors began renovations on the historic structure, which had been shut up tight for more than twenty years. Its twenty guest rooms were updated and decorated with nineteenth century–style furnishings, and the Legacy Room Naming Program was started. Donors commemorated their families’ heritage with displays of their vintage photos and memorabilia in selected guest rooms. The parlor and dining room were renovated, and the hotel reopened with a gala celebration.

The Windsor Hotel was built in 1874 by Henry Foote, and as Del Norte’s largest building, it dominated Grand Avenue. Its lobby bustled with wealthy investors who came to meet mine executives, local ranchers making cattle deals, and farmers arranging sales of their crops. The railroad’s arrival in 1881 brought more people, and a vacant room at the Windsor was a rarity, so additions were added in 1884 and 1888.

The hotel survived the Depression and two world wars but was forced to close in the 1970s. It sat vacant, neglected, and deteriorating for the next twenty years until it was within hours of demolition in 1993.

Citizens participated in the Windsor’s restoration through the Legacy Room Naming Program. Courtesy of Wendy Williams.

GHOSTS

After the renovations were completed in 2011, strange things began happening, and everyone wondered if this old hotel had a ghost. Then objects started flying across the kitchen, occasionally hitting someone. The television set in the bar was always turned off at closing, but every morning it was on; the sets in vacant rooms were always turned on.

The historian from the local museum suggested that some answers might be found in their archives. Newspaper clippings told about Maude Heinze, who committed suicide in 1906 at the hotel. The daughter of a wealthy man from Creede, she was an accomplished pianist, who also played the violin. Maude met a handsome brakeman for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad named Parker, and after a whirlwind romance, the two became engaged. She didn’t know that Parker had planned to marry someone else, but they’d had a bad quarrel and a broken engagement.

Then unexpectedly, Parker and his girlfriend buried their differences and resumed their romance. Parker broke Maude’s heart when he told her that he didn’t love her. The grief-stricken young woman took a room at the Windsor Hotel, using the name Violet Tierri from Ohio. She wrote a letter to her father and another to Parker and mailed them at the post office. Then she went to the Mercantile, where she bought a .38 caliber revolver and a box of bullets. She returned to her room at the Windsor and loaded the gun. After some reflection upon her life, Maude shot herself in the chest, but the shots weren’t fatal. Dismayed to find that she was still alive, Maude shakily brought the pistol up to her temple and pulled the trigger. The sound of gunshots brought the hotel staff to Room 209 where they were horrified to find poor Maude drawing her last breath.

Maude’s father was notified, and the grief-stricken parent retrieved his daughter’s body. Then he tracked down Parker and confronted him. The young man insisted that he’d made a mistake in romancing Maude and repeatedly swore that he had never loved her. This didn’t comfort Maude’s distraught father, who had to bury his young daughter in the Creede Cemetery.

The ghost of Maude Heinze was stirred up by the renovation of the hotel’s twenty rooms, dining room, and fancy parlor. She made her presence known in a variety of disruptive ways and frightened hotel employees. A housekeeper working in room 210 saw the clothes’ hangers suddenly start swinging wildly in the closet when there wasn’t a draft, and no one else was in the room. The radios and TVs in guests’ rooms turned on and off suddenly, and in the bar, glasses went flying off the shelves. When he was closing at night, the bartender often heard the sound of a dripping faucet. This persisted even after the faucet had been turned off several times. Finally, the exasperated bartender shouted, “All right, Maude, I know it’s you! Cut it out!” The dripping stopped.

Guests noticed some strange things around the hotel, and their room’s doors opened and closed mysteriously. Keys and personal items disappeared often. A woman in room 204 complained that she’d been awakened in the middle of the night by someone running a vacuum directly outside her door. When she threw the door open, the sound stopped, and no one was there. Occasionally, guests staying in room 209 have been awakened by the sound of moans coming from within the room. This stopped immediately when a light was turned on. Other guests have been terrified by the wispy figure of a woman standing near their bedside or drifting about the room.

Several paranormal groups have investigated the activity at the hotel, paying special attention to rooms 209 and 210. One team obtained varying EMF (electromagnetic field) readings in room 209 and recorded the sound of voices that their spirit box picked up in these rooms. Some paranormal investigators speculate that as many as eight spirits are roaming through the Windsor Hotel.