Morley, Colorado
Colorado
A demolition crew leveled an entire Colorado town but refused to touch the church, and its bell tower is still standing.
In 1956 the coal company that owned Morley closed its mine and knocked down every building it had put up. The reason was liability. They didn't want squatters or trespassers on their property. But the crew stopped at St. Aloysius Catholic Church. Tearing down holy ground felt sacrilegious to them, so they left it. Part of the ruin is still there, with a Spanish colonial bell tower, beside the interstate and the rail line. Part of what killed the mine was mules. Nearly a hundred and fifty of them worked underground here, and each one ate more than ten pounds of oats and a bale of hay every day. Other mines had gone electric. Morley hadn't. Over its life the mine gave up more than eleven million tons of coal, most of it shipped north to the steel plant in Pueblo. In 2011 a development group wanted to rebuild the church and the old town as a tourist attraction. Neighbors killed the idea. They preferred the quiet.
Wayside reads this to you as you drive past, timed to arrive before the place does. Plan a route through here.
The demolition crew felt it was sacrilegious to tear down "holy ground," and part of the church ruins remains to this day.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
- Sugarite Canyon State Park 9.3 mi A coal town of nearly a thousand people stood in this canyon, and now a hiking trail runs through its ruins.
- Raton Downtown Historic District 9.8 mi In 1914 the largest hotel in New Mexico stood on a corner in Raton, with four hundred rooms.
- Drop City 13.3 mi The domes here were built from the chopped-off roofs of cars.
- Ludlow Massacre 21.7 mi Detectives hired by the coal company built an armored car with a machine gun on it and called it the Death Special.
- Capulin Volcano National Monument 34.2 mi When Capulin erupted, the lava didn't come out the top — it leaked out a weak spot at the base called the boca.