Harvesting Historical Riches

The Uravan Historic District and Colorado's Atomic Age

Signs posted outside the Uravan boarding house and recreation hall in western Montrose County warn visitors that the area may be radioactive. These two structures, standing alone on the lower section of the San Miguel River, are all that remain of a company town called Uravan. To the uninformed visitor, the signs are the only indication that these ordinary buildings served a community that mined and milled radioactive materials for most of the twentieth century. The materials-including radium, vanadium, and uranium-not only influenced Colorado history, they affected world events.

Madame Curie used the region's radium for her pioneering medical research, and Manhattan Project scientists used the region's uranium in the atomic weapons that ended the war with Japan in World War II. However, few structures remain standing to remind people of that legacy. Amid justified fears about contamination, workers have systematically dismantled, demolished, and buried most of Uravan's historically significant buildings and structures. The loss spurred concerned organizations, including the Rimrocker Historical Society, the Umetco Mineral Corporation, and others, to action.

Uravan's story began in 1881 when prospector Tom Talbert discovered a mysterious yellow-colored ore while looking for gold in Montrose County. Later, scientists at the Smithsonian Institution identified the material as carnotite, a mineral that contains radium, vanadium, and uranium. By 1899 Madame Curie's use of radium for medical purposes had opened up new markets for carnotite ore. Independent miners and large companies staked claims and began producing a significant portion of Madame Curie's radium.

In 1914 a boarding house was built for the single men who worked in the area. A year later the Standard Chemical Company built a concentrator, called the Joe Jr. Mill, near the boarding house at present-day Uravan. The company profited through World War I, but a sagging economy and competition from high-grade radium-bearing ore in the Belgian Congo forced it to close its mines and mill in 1921.

Soon after, engineers discovered other uses for carnotite constituents. In 1928 the U.S. Vanadium Corporation bought the Joe Jr. Mill and later refined vanadium, a substance used to harden steel. In the mid-1930s the company established the town of Uravan (named for URAnium and VANadium) to accommodate its employees and their families. It built stores, a post office, a fire station, schools, a health clinic, a swimming pool, and a sports field along the San Miguel River near the mill site. A relocated Civilian Conservation Corps structure served the community as a recreation hall and social hub. Houses, arranged in discreet blocks and segregated according to size, flanked the central business area. About seven hundred people lived in Uravan while federal purchases propped up vanadium prices. When the government stopped buying in 1944, the second carnotite boom ended.

At roughly the same time, the Manhattan Project gave the company town new life. Scientists used Uravan's uranium, recovered from vanadium tailing piles, in the Los Alamos test bomb and in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From 1948 to 1958 the Atomic Energy Commission sustained the uranium boom by offering discovery bonuses and guaranteed prices for uranium ore. Thousands of fortune hunters came to the region hoping to cash in on this federally financed mining craze. Mills at Uravan, Vancorum, Durango, and Grand Junction operated at full capacity until the early 1960s when they began to shut down. The mills started up again when private nuclear power plants began purchasing uranium in the 1970s, but environmental concerns cut this mini boom short after only a few years. Uravan's mines, mills, and town closed for good in 1984.

But Uravan's story wasn't over. The Colorado Department of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency determined that Uravan's irradiated buildings, equipment, and tailings posed a significant public health threat. In 1986 U.S. Vanadium's parent company, Union Carbide, agreed to clean up the newly declared Superfund site by demolishing all remaining structures and burying them under several feet of rock and clay. As work progressed, preservationists-including Rimrocker Historical Society members and others-worried that Uravan's contribution to Colorado and world history would be buried too.

Saving the buildings presented the Rimrocker Historical Society with a unique challenge. Carolyn "Cookie" Been led these efforts before she passed away in 1999. It is a testament to her dedication that the buildings have been saved. Before Been and her fellow preservationists could begin the process of designation and rehabilitation, they had to convince state and federal agencies that the hazardous buildings were worth saving at all. They helped their cause by doing their homework. In 1993 preservation specialist Marty Alexandroff wrote a historic context for Uravan. Financed by the State historical Fund, the UMETCO Minerals Corporation (the current property owner), and others, this document linked the buildings to Uravan's remarkable history. A year later, former Uravan residents held a picnic in Grand Junction. Alexandroff distributed a questionnaire asking them which remaining buildings should be saved. They overwhelmingly chose the boarding house and recreation hall. Armed with a UMETCO study showing that these two structures had the least amount of contamination of the remaining buildings, the Rimrocker Historical Society successfully nominated the Joe Jr. Mill and Camp (which included the two buildings) to the State Register of Historic Properties. Once listed, the historic district was eligible for State Historical Fund assistance.

After years of patient planning, preservationists took up their hammers in 1999 and got to work. First, Umetco removed contaminated earth from around both buildings. Then they replaced the roof on the recreation hall; a process that required the installation of new roof sheeting in addition to shingles. Umetco donated the labor, while the Rimrocker Historical Society funded the project with assistance from the State Historical Fund. In 2001, local contractors started work on the boarding house. They fixed doors and windows, restored the historic stairway and balcony, and replaced rotten siding. They also re-roofed the building and painted it, returning it as near as possible to its original color.

Today, the restored structures stand out from their freshly bulldozed surroundings. The mill is gone, as are most of the other mining-related structures. In time, UMETCO's reclamation efforts will return the environment to its natural condition, and someone will remove the signs that warn visitors about radioactive materials. If no one had fought to preserve the remaining structures, passersby might not guess that this place, and the people who lived and worked here, played a significant role in world history.

BY BEN FOGELBERG, Editor