Railroads and Globeville

Coloradans rejoiced when the Denver Pacific Railroad's first train steamed into Denver on June 22, 1870, and celebrated again when the Kansas Pacific arrived in August. Now the territory was connected to the rest of the nation and settlers had access to supplies, markets for their products and mail. To an economy dependent on minerals and mining, railroads also promised an outlet for Colorado's gold and silver.
In 1878, the Boston and Colorado Smelter relocated from Black Hawk and built a large plant west of the Platte River, taking advantage of the confluence of rail lines on the plains. The Omaha and Grant Smelter opened in 1882 and the Globe followed in 1889. Foundries, pattern shops, brick yards and businesses that supported mining grew along the rails, as well as meat packing plants and machine shops to service the railroads. Within a generation, a rural outpost had become the industrial town of Globeville, surrounded by railroads.
The rail lines appear on maps with the names changing with each merger or acquisition: the Denver Pacific and the Kansas Pacific would become the Union Pacific (1880); the Colorado and Southern (1898); the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy (1901); the Denver and Salt Lake (1912), and the Denver and Interurban (owned by the Colorado and Southern).
Today, there are only two rail lines: the Burlington Northern and the Union Pacific, and they still encompass and define Globeville.

1898 Rollandet map

 

Company picnic, photo used with written permission from Ed Wargin

 

 Burlington chugs past Polack Valley ® Mary Lou Egan

 

Denver Sewer Pipe and Clay - the Brickyards

Established in 1889 at 44th and Fox Street in the town of Argo by James Green of St. Louis, the Denver Sewer Pipe and Clay Company primarily manufactured pipe used in sewers. The firm was purchased in 1892 by William F. Geddes, David D. Seerie, and E. R. Ball.
Geddes and Seerie had formed a contracting business in 1885 and worked on large projects that included the Cheesman Dam, Brown Palace Hotel and the Colorado State Capitol building. The acquisition of the company provided a local source for construction material as well as jobs for the residents of nearby Globeville.
In 1900, the firm added a brick manufacturing plant, and by the 1930s, workers were tending some 50 beehive kilns. Almost every kind of heavy-duty clay product was made there: building bricks, sewer pipe, locomotive arch tile (used in the combustion chambers of steam locomotives), and tile conduit. It was the largest company of its kind between the Missouri River and the Pacific coast, and its workforce had grown from its original 25 to more than 200 employees. Raw clay for the bricks was quarried in the Golden and Parker areas, west and south of Denver. 
In 1956, the company changed its name to Denver Brick and Pipe Company, and built a block-long structure that used a tunnel-kiln process instead of the older beehive method. Eventually the company outgrew its location and, in 1982, built a new facility near Castle Rock, halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs. The firm was renamed Denver Brick.
The 130-foot smokestack that towered over the location at 44th and Fox has been torn down and the beehive kilns that glowed red-hot are gone. So is the marble slab that was embedded in the office reception hall. The message chiseled in its surface read, “Not by frost, nor by fire, nor by flood, nor even by time, are well-burned clay products destroyed.” The Denver Post printing plant occupied the site for several years.

 

Photo used with permission from the Denver Public Library