NEDERLAND - Generations and generations have argued about Nederland’s identity. The small mountain town has been classified as a “quirky” hippie town and the former home of a vibrant music scene. It has been called Middle Boulder, a tourist hub, an entryway to countless outdoor adventures no matter what direction you go on the Peak to Peak Highway. 

Until recently, the Town of Nederland has struggled to pinpoint what it wants to be, as major municipal projects sometimes highlight a split in the community, with opinions, concerns, and emotions teetering between classifying Nederland as a lively tourist town, or as a sleepy bedroom community. 

Whether the Town’s Board of Trustees (BOT) are analyzing water rights expansion, annexation considerations, the leasing of Town-owned land for childcare, affordable housing initiatives, or downtown redevelopment, Nederland’s identity is always an underlying factor.

Identity is of so much importance that the BOT even hired a branding and marketing firm to define it. Over months of engaging with the community, meeting with stakeholders, and filtering keyword and swatch-selecting exercises into design elements, the result was a logo, color scheme, and a collection of unique department headings for the Town to use on its official notices, its website, and on its grant applications. 

During the very public process, at no point were the identities of “ski town” or “mining town” considered as options, even though both identities are the most true—for what Nederland is and could become, and for what it always was. 

Mining equipment can be found rusting proudly on Nederland’s street corners, the site of the old Wolf Tongue Mill can still be seen as your eyes follow the creek through the middle of town, and many of the town’s historic structures carry tales from one or many of the mining eras, including the Covered Wagon, Sweet Sue’s, Crosscut, and Town Hall. 

As you drive into town, chances are the first things you notice that are distinctly Nederland are either the 100-year old-Bucyrus Model 50-B steam shovel, or the stone facade of the Nederland Mining Museum.   

But despite this, those who come through town, regardless of the length of their stay, sometimes fail to realize that Nederland not only was a mining town, but in many ways, apart from the mild embracing of its history, still is a mining town.

Just four miles above Nederland, among the still visible foundations of Caribou—the ill-fated township that spawned Nederland—lies the area’s namesake, the Caribou and Cross Mines. This site has a long, storied history that continues today, with the mines being in operation as recently as just over six years ago.

“In 1869, these three gentlemen locate this silver deposit up near Caribou; they try to keep it secret for the first year but word gets out,” Donal Maloney said in an interview with The Mountain-Ear, speaking about Samuel Conger, William Martin, and George Lytle and their discovery that is still relevant over 150 years later.

Maloney is a geologist who works with Boulder County Parks and Open Space in their Education and Outreach Department in the Cultural History Program. Maloney not only manages the Nederland Mining Museum, he has firsthand experience with the subject matter, having worked at the Cash Mine in Gold Hill 19 years ago.

“The Caribou deposit was unusually rich,” Maloney explained. “It was so uniquely concentrated in favorable chemicals and a weathering environment that it was worth more in silver than in gold.” 

In 1870, Cincinnati capitalist Abel D. Breed purchased half of the Caribou claim for $50,000, and built the Caribou Mill, which gained fame as the most successful silver mill in the area, earning publicity for producing 30 silver bricks to pave the front of the Teller House in Central City for Ulysses S. Grant’s visit in 1873. 

The news reached a Dutch investment group, The Mining Company Nederland, who became intrigued by Breed’s success. They purchased the claim for $3 million, the equivalent of roughly $80 million today. However, during the six-month process of the sale, Breed had the mine completely stripped.

“Within three years they go bankrupt,” Maloney said matter-of-factly.

After the Dutch company’s departure in 1875, the name of the place that was then called Middle Boulder was changed to Nederland, meaning “low land,” in honor of what the Dutch had nicknamed it during their short time here.  

The Tungsten Boom accelerated Nederland’s growth into a true mining town. It became the lead producer of the important wartime metal from 1909 to 1918, and produced more than $23 million worth of tungsten from 1900 to 1945. But when the boom died it took the mining industry with it and severely halted the town’s progress. 

The Caribou and Cross Mines did not fare well during this time, juggled by a few different owners before being shuttered in 1939.

“The last big boom was during the Korean War,” Jim Smith told The Mountain-Ear as he described the last gasp of the country’s need for tungsten. 

Jim is one of Mike and Jeanette Smith’s six children, a part of a legacy family with roots in Nederland going as far back as 1946.  

“The mining fell apart in ’58 or ’59. The ski area hadn’t been built yet or anything, and a lot of people just packed up and moved to another mining town, and that was devastating to someone who the only thing they’ve done is mining,” Jeanette said in a 2024 interview with The Mountain-Ear, describing how her husband had to adapt during that time.  

Mike Smith had worked in many mines throughout his career, including Cold Springs, Conger, Cross, Eureka, and Tungsten Mill, and worked in construction and carpentry right up until retiring in 2000.

Mike passed away in 2021, but he is remembered as a community leader and a fixture at Miners Days, a festival, no longer celebrated in Nederland, that highlighted the culture of mining.

“The only games in town in the ’60s were in Boulder County. They would reopen those mines but they never took off.” Jim followed in his father’s footsteps for a good part of his early career, working in local mines, but he remembers clearly when things dried up.

“Up here there was nothing. Tungsten was dead; Caribou was dead; a lot of miners left or went to work for the state and for the County,” Jim added, describing Nederland at that time as inching towards ghost town status. “They started bussing kids in so the schools maintained population. In the summers I had two friends in town.”

Of this time of transition and uncertainty, when Nederland had lost the industry that birthed it, and before the ski area brought in a new era of tourism, Jeanette distinctly remembers one unforeseen factor to the town’s difficulties: the hippies.

“Our hippie era was just hellacious,” Jeanette stated bluntly. 

In the midst of the town struggling through its hippie era, it took a visionary to try and reignite the spark of industry back in Nederland. That visionary was Tom Hendricks, a trusted local, a guardian of nature, born to be a miner and a leader. 

There are stories of Hendricks, as young as four years old, searching for gold in Cripple Creek, Ouray, and Colorado Springs, where he grew up. At age 11 he was working for his father in his limestone mines on Rampart Range in Colorado Springs.

By age 18 he was mining for gold in Cripple Creek’s Ajax Mine for the Golden Cycle Mining Corporation. Reportedly, Hendricks had even written in his high school yearbook that he would one day own and operate his own gold mine. 

The Good Hope Mine east of Ward, the Andecite rock quarry in Lyons, and the Comstock Mine on top of Caribou Hilich—all operations where Hendricks cut his teeth while attending college at the University of Colorado in Boulder. 

“I went to work up here in May of 1971, and my first job was a shaft-sinking project at the Comstock silver mine,” Hendricks said in an interview with Anne Dyni in 2002 for the Boulder County Parks and Open Space and the Maria Rogers Oral History Program.

“I told the owner, Richard Sigismond, that I'd go to work for him if I could get a lease on the cabins here at the Cross Mine.

“I met the owners from California and they said, ‘we’d love to have somebody in the cabins, upkeeping them and maintaining them and watching over the Cross Mine.’ So they let me live here while I was working at the Comstock Mine.”

Soon after that arrangement, the Caribou Mining District was created and the Hendricks Mining Company was established, which in 1974 became the official owner and operator of the Caribou and Cross Mines.

“When I first went to [the owners in] California, I didn't have one dime to my name. I was living from paycheck to paycheck, and I tried to convince the family that were the descendants of this whole mining/ranching family from California, that at age 22, I could open a gold mine and make it work,” Hendricks said.

“They said, ‘you’re a little young to be doing this.’ And I kept hammering them, and in 1974 they gave me a 15-year lease on this mine. So I quit work at the Comstock and immediately started with a pick and a shovel and a wheelbarrow. And I still have that wheelbarrow.

“I didn't even know what the price of gold was. I just knew that I wanted to open my own gold mine.”

The Hendricks Mining Company owned the Caribou and Cross Mines for 43 years, during which time Hendricks grew from drawing maps of his mines onto the back of Safeway bags by candlelight, to being the first mining company in Boulder County to create 3D digital renderings of their vein maps.   

Hendricks ushered in a new era of mining that was committed to flexibility in a changing political climate, to environmental responsibility, and to being a good neighbor to Nederland.

Then, in 2017, the Hendricks Mining Company, and the claims on the Caribou and Cross Mines, were bought by a relatively unheard of entity known as Grand Island Resources (GIR). 

In the following years, GIR’s attempts to further modernize the mines would be marred by a major tunnel collapse, the loss of their president, and a cease and desist order from state regulators as a result of pollutant violations involving traces of copper and lead found in Nederland’s watershed. 

The accusations levied against the company about the risk to the City of Boulder’s drinking water resulted in the Town of Nederland, its Mayor, Town Administrator, and BOT being threatened with a $5 million lawsuit for libel and slander, setting an unfortunate precedent for communications between the two entities that is still a factor today. 

Corrections:

Thanks to Kirsten Springer, we now know that the photo on page 22 of the August 28 issue of The Mountain-Ear is incorrectly identified. According to Ms.Springer, "This is actually Jim Smith competing in the jackleg competition with Mike Smith looking on officiating....Mike was the official and Jim competed. Jim also went to the World Championship in Carson City at least twice but never placed first as his dad had back in the day."

In the August 28 issue of The Mountain-Ear  "The Mines Part One: Caribou and Cross, from 1870 to 1970" article stated that Grand Island Resources threatened to sue the Town of Nederland with a $5 million lawsuit. This was incorrect. The article should have said that Grand Island Resources threatened the Town of Nederland with a $500 million lawsuit. We apologize for the error.