We are right in downtown Sunrise, a mining town.

We like to accentuate the fact that we think we may be the oldest continuously mined site in North America.

We had paleo peoples here 13,000 years ago extracting essentially iron ore as red iron oxide, pigment for their traditional uses or their medicinal uses or their ritual probably ritual uses.

And that continued we have documented that continued for thousands of years.

And then when the Europeans came, we started extracting initially copper here and then 80 years of iron mining here.

And I am continuing the mining by what I do here also.

So continuously mined for at least 13,000 years.

The first European mining here was what I call the copper era.

It was essentially the 1880s, that decade of 1880 to 1890.

Actually, the military and the soldiers stationed at Fort Laramie did a lot of the prospecting in this geologic feature we call the Hartville Uplift.

And they were the ones that discovered the copper.

First real copper strike was 1881 and the copper boom resulted in a little town just down the street here away is called Hartville.

And its fate was determined by, you know, the boom bust, the boom bust era of the 1880s for copper.

The copper in the area played out within the decade.

But the miners noticed rich iron deposits ripe to exploit.

Sunrise as essentially a mining camp.

We would call it a company town.

They would they would refer to it as a mining camp.

It was only owned and operated by a company called Colorado Fuel and Iron, headquartered in Pueblo, Colorado.

Where their smelters are and their steelworks facilities are.

CF&I was the largest steel manufacturer in the West.

They took an interest in the rich iron deposits in the Sunrise area.

Really an interesting thing.

The first time they came up was about 1893 and assessing the ore body, assessing the quality of the material of the mineral, their geologists thought there might be 300,000 tons of ore here.

That's not that's not much by any standard.

They came up again about five years later, maybe 800 or 900 thousand tons here.

That was enough to interest Colorado Fuel and Iron in coming up and establishing a mine here.

So they took an option on some of these mining claims moved up.

In the 80 years that CF&I mined here, then mined out over 43 million tons and were going to be here for another 20 years.

And so the estimates were a little bit off.

So, CF&I, they made a good bargain when they got these claims because it was a much, much more higher quality deposit and a larger deposit than they had thought.

The company exploited three different or bodies in the area.

The Chicago the Central and the largest one, the Sunrise Ore body.

1901.

They finally got rail service, so then they could really start some serious production, then.

the build out of the town.

The development of the mine occurred rapidly from 1901 on.

Sunrise is a mining camp.

It was really the only business model that was practical back in the day.

There were no people here.

There was no infrastructure.

There were no roads, no highways.

We're just getting some rail service.

So the business model had to be a mining camp where you provided food, shelter, water.

You had to provide all this and some social structures, some like social halls, things for the folks to do.

It was an interesting enterprise developing a town which, by the way, when they developed this town, highly engineered, highly modern, nothing like it in the area, the streets and running water and electricity, sewer in the street.

And eventually, of course, Wyoming's first YMCA hospital, very modern place for these immigrants to come work.

But they were completely isolated.

You had to bring in the people first.

And these are largely immigrants that they would that they would hire often bring them directly from Europe.

Most of the early immigrants here were of Greek and Italian descent.

And a lot of those families are still here.

Most mining camps, there's nothing left but maybe some foundations.

The great thing about Sunrise is the fact that we still have something left.

We still have a few residences, the YMCA and some buildings left in what we call the industrial area.

They give an indication of what life may have been like here in those first few years.

It was estimated there were like 1200 people living in this canyon, which probably included Sunrise and Hartville, maximum population for the town here with 100 homes and boarding homes is probably 6 to 700 people.

And it was the largest town in Platte County for many years.

And then as as the population dwindled because of mechanization and people moving off site to live in adjoining towns and commuting in, then the town probably stabilized in the thirties and forties at around 300 to 400 people.

It's not an incorporated town.

There were no there was no police.

There was no.

Then you didn't elect city officials.

There was no mayor.

Everything was run by the superintendent.

The superior was even the president, the school board, and they had good schools here.

So it was a totally different town.

They also had their own rules.

And one of the rules was it was a dry town and there was no alcohol permitted on the town.

On the other hand, Hartville was a wild, rollicking Western pioneer town.

It was it was the old West.

You know, Hartville had bars, it had brothels, it had Mercantiles, it had all this.

It was a wild town.

So all of the needs that maybe could not be met here, in the town, here, all the miners could walk to Hartville and walk home.

They were really kind of essential to each other.

The crown jewel of the town of Sunrise was the YMCA.

This YMCA is a fantastic story because it was really kind of the cultural capital of eastern Wyoming for many, many years, had cultural programs here.

They had Americanization classes, speaker series, political rallies, all the community events were held here, including wedding receptions, things like that.

Although production at the site remained high through the sixties and seventies.

The population of the town began to decline.

Even so, the miners did not see the end coming.

The door slammed shut in July of 1980.

Well, why did they quit production?

They had planned on mining here for at least 20 more years.

It's a confluence of events that caused the closure of this mine.

There were oil embargoes in the seventies, so their cost for operating this mine went way high because of fuel costs.

There were unmet and expensive commitments to pensions for for labor here.

Another contributing factor was the fact that the IRS had promulgated different accounting procedures in the in the mid 1970s.

And so because they had to carry assets and liabilities in different way, it looked like even though they've been operating like this for years and years and years, it looked like they were insolvent.

It looks like they could not meet obligations.

And when investors look at you and you look like you're insolvent, you're insolvent.

And so the value of CF&I stock went to zero and they left a skeletal crew here for some years to keep maintaining the equipment in case they did open up.

But basically they knew they weren't going to reopen.

So they had an auction.

They tried to get rid of everything they could to get as much money out of this place as they could.

They forfeited their reclamation bond to Wyoming and they abandoned the property and they walked out of here about 1984.

The state of Wyoming conducted the required reclamation work on the mines, but ownership of the townsite was disputed in courts for years.

John bought it in 2011 from a private owner.

He found that the property had rich stories to tell, and now he takes his responsibility to tell those stories very seriously.

You look at the thousands of people that worked here, got their education here, grew up here.

This was their hometown.

And yet they had to leave.

We as as individuals and we as people, we're informed and our character and who we are is informed a lot by where we grew up and where we work.

That happens for a lot of people in this town.

And so a lot of people that come here have an emotional experience when they come here.

And that to me is a most amazing story.

It was a large mine.

It was a large economic impact on on the economy of Wyoming for years and years and years, for 80 years.

And yet I didn't know about it.

Why didn't we talk about it in school?

Was I just not paying attention?

I don't think so.

Could've been.

but I talked to other people.

No, we've we didn't really know about Sunrise.

The next chapter of the Sunrise story will be revealed as archeologists work on uncovering the paleo material on the site that dates back to 13,000 years ago.

John and many others are passionate about preserving that history as well.