By Susan Jesuroga Beyond the old brick storefronts in downtown Salida and the ghost of the rail yard, long dismantled, there is still one tall and unmistakable symbol of Salida’s industrial past. This sight is familiar to any traveler entering Salida from the north: the 365-foot smelter smokestack. In the late 1800s, Western states saw …
Robert Martin Stein was seven years old when this photograph of him was taken in 1919 in front of the 365-foot tall brick smokestack near Salida, built for the long-since defunct Ohio and Colorado Smelting and Refining Company.
Robert is wearing his first suit, which happened to be homemade, and is posing in front of “his rock” which he used to leap from as a child. His father helped in the construction of the smokestack, which is still standing in 2012.
The Smelter Smokestack
Smeltertown was home to the Ohio-Colorado Smelting and Refining Company, which employed 500 people until World War I. Raw ore from hard rock mining was crushed in stamping mills then transported to smelters to extract metals.