Editing Lafayette, Colorado (section)

===Industry===
Not only did coal mined in Lafayette, Louisville, Marshall and Erie heat Denver's growing number of households starting in the late 1880s, it also fueled Denver's smelters, cotton mills, breweries, paper mills, shoe factories and power plants.<ref name="LafHist" />

In 1899, the Colorado Inspector of Coal mines estimated that the 405-square-mile Northern Coal Field contained 2.56&nbsp;billion tons of coal.<ref name="LafHist" />

Up to the turn of the 20th century, Denver customers consumed most of the coal mined in the area as fast it could be hauled up from the tunnels. Lafayette coal mines were wired for telephones starting in 1891, almost 15 years before the rest of town, because the Denver coal dealers needed a quicker way to place orders.<ref name="LafHist" />

The first recorded evidence of coal near Lafayette was made in the summer of 1864 by General Land Office surveyor Hiram Witter, who noted in his field survey notebook for Township 1 South, Range 69 West that "In the NE 1/4 of the NE 1/4 of Sec. 1 is an outcrop of coal 1 chain long (66 feet) and 4 ft. thick, extent unknown." This is where Baseline Road crosses over Coal Creek east of Lafayette. Witter drew a line through a notation in his notebook that the "coal bank had been opened" and replaced it with "coal outcrop." The notation "had been opened" may indicate that the coal was being "worked" by settlers.<ref name="LafHist" />

Area pioneers gathered coal from surface outcrops to use for home heating. One outcropping of coal, mentioned by Mary Miller as being discovered in 1872, was located at about the center of the Foote-Miller Farm and mined by the Cambro / Pluto slope mine from 1917 to 1928.<ref name="LafHist" />

Mary Miller and her brother, James B. Foote, leased some of their farm land north of the Cambro / Pluto coal outcrop first to John H. Simpson, who would sink two separate Lafayette coal mines – the Simpson in late 1887 and the Spencer in 1889 – then to James Cannon Jr. in 1888. The Standard mine, about a mile east of the Spencer-Simpson mines, was also sunk in 1887.<ref name="LafHist" />

By the early 1880s, railroads were the largest consumer of Colorado coal, and Lafayette joined the coal mining bandwagon when Colorado & Southern Railway completed a 3-mile spur from Louisville in 1889, paid for by the newly formed Spencer-Simpson Coal Company. That spur eventually connected to Erie. The railroad links to Erie, Louisville, Lafayette and Marshall coal mines nurtured the industrialization of coal mining.<ref name="LafHist" />

The coal under Lafayette and most of the area northwest of Denver known as the Northern Coal Field or Northern Field is sub-bituminous coal, a soft, friable coal that was highly suited for household heating stoves and for firing steam boilers. Sub-bituminous coal, also called lignite, could sometimes spontaneously combust when it came in contact with air.<ref name="LafHist" />

A significant factor in Lafayette's coal mining history were the three successive Denver-based coal conglomerates – United Coal Company, Northern Coal Co. and Rocky Mountain Fuel Company – that controlled coal production and employed thousands of local coal miners. From 1891, when United Coal was formed, to 1944, when Rocky Mountain Fuel Co. reorganized and closed most of its mines, the coal operators influenced not only how mass-scale coal was mined, marketed and sold, but how communities adjacent to the coal mines – Lafayette, Louisville, Erie, Canfield and Marshall developed.<ref name="LafHist" />

In 1898, only 5 percent of coal mined in Lafayette was used for home heating, the rest went to Denver power plants, manufacturers and steam locomotives. From June 1, 1897, to May 31, 1898, over 680,000 tons of coal were shipped to Denver from Northern Field coal mines. In the 1920s and 1930s, Great Western Sugar in Longmont and the Valmont Generating Station in Boulder were primary coal consumers. By the mid-1940s, most of the coal mines had closed.<ref name="LafHist" />

Most of the mines associated with the bankrupt Rocky Mountain Fuel Co., including the Columbine, were closed in 1946, after which area mines were owned and run by independent owners. Lafayette's last mine, the Black Diamond, located at today's U.S. 287 and Baseline Road, closed in 1956. The independently owned Hi-Way mine in Louisville and the Gorham in Superior closed in 1955. Erie's Eagle mine was the last coal mine to operate in the Northern Coal Field. It closed in 1975.<ref name="LafHist" />

Very little evidence of Lafayette's coal mining past remains today. A few structures moved from the mine camps dot Old Town and the Lafayette Miner's Museum retains some of the tools of the coal mining trade.