Colorado City,CO – Pueblo County – c1890 – Colo-Phila Reduction Company Silver Ingot
Presentation Ingot. Top reads: Colo-Phila Reduction / Company / Colorado City, Colo; Bottom reads: J. A. Hayes; Measures 3 5/8″ x 1.25″ x .75.”
Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company Silver ingot
Copyright By Fred Holabird, March 3, 2003
A unique fancy presentation silver ingot engraved from the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Co. to J. A. Hayes was recently sold at auction. The auction company was without the proper knowledge to understand the true importance of this ingot, some of which follows.
This wonderful silver ingot is a presentation ingot bearing the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company name was presented to one of the CPRC Board members upon the opening of the reduction works in 1896. J. A. Hayes, whose name is borne upon the ingot in fancy engraved fashion of the period was the president of the First National Bank in Colorado Springs and one of the key investors in the Company. The Colorado Philadelphia Reduction Company was the brainchild of two of Cripple Creek’s wealthiest millionaires -Spencer Penrose, and his childhood friend Charlie Tutt, both raised in Philadelphia. The pair were real estate tycoons and stock brokers in the early days of Cripple Creek. Penrose’s brother was one of the most prominent geologists of the period, teaching at Stanford University.
Tutt and Penrose were partners in Cripple Creek from the beginning days of the first discoveries. Tutt had staked the C. O. D. mining claim on which rich ores were struck in 1893. The resultant huge flow of cash allowed the pair to buy into other great mines in Cripple Creek that included the Granite, Gold Coin, and Ajax mines. Each of these floated public issues (stock) that made the men wealthy beyond their dreams. They continued their purchasing of control of important support industries to Cripple Creek such ads the Midland Terminal Railway. In 1904 the pair raised $500,000 to start the Utah Copper Company which went on to become one of the world’s great copper mines at Bingham, Utah. From this enterprise alone Penrose reportedly made $200,000 per month.
The Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company began operation in 1896, capitalized at $250,000. The mill and reduction works provided an incredibly important process for the complex Cripple Creek sulfide ores. Most of the near surface oxide ores discovered about 1891-3 had become depleted, but the ore bodies continued at depth into fresh sulfides that carried the precious cargo of gold. A new milling method was necessary to remove the gold from the sulfides which involved roasting the ores. In their first full year of operation in 1897, they “ran exclusively Cripple Creek ores,” treating 59, 051 tons. ($1.562 million). The company used the barrel chlorination process which made them the “largest and most modern constructed of any similar mill in the United States.” Additionally, they installed 20 Wilfley tables to treat about 30,000 tons of old Cripple Creek tailings that were said to contain about $1.25 per ton. The tables concentrated the tails 75 to 1 yielding much more gold for the company.
The next year saw an explosion in reduction works treating Cripple Creek ores, all trying to copy the Colorado-Philadelphia Company and compete with them. Seven reduction works were in production in El Paso County in 1898, according to Rothwell in the Mineral Industry, 1898, vol.7, p291. A lengthy write-up on the company’s technical processes is found in this volume.
The works were known as the Colorado City Chlorination works. Charlie MacNeill was the general manager of the plant in 1898 and stayed on through about 1904, when he left with Penrose to start the Utah Copper Company. The Company’s plant was a fully modern roasting and chlorination plant with a capacity of about 225 tons per day, an improvement on the original design. At least one report mentioned a capacity of 250 tons per day. After roasting, the sulfides reportedly contained 72% gold, which further reduced to .940 fine bullion or better.
The name of the Company that Tutt and Penrose chose was done with great care and knowledge of promotion. The name was an attempt to directly link the name of the Guggenheim-owned smelting works, the Philadelphia Smelting & Refining Co. to the Colorado Philadelphia Reduction Co. Even though the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company was a legitimate, as well as up-and-coming company, naive investor would see the similarity in names, which no doubt was thoroughly mentioned in promotional material, and invest. The Guggenheims erected a smelter in Colorado 1888 at a cost of $1.25 million. In 1899 the Guggenheims and Standard Oil interests formed the largest refining company yet, combining 18 of the largest refining works in North America into the American Smelting & Refining Co. (ASARCO), still in business today. The Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Co. was not among those to join the ASARCO enterprise and may not have been invited, since the Guggenheim clan probably knew little of the Tutt-Penrose dealings. ASARCO’s hold over the smelting and refining business was so great that nearly all their competitors were forced out of business by 1910, as happened with the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Co. shortly thereafter. The Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company name was also a take-off of the Colorado Mining and Smelting Co., a “Standard Oil property” later one of the company’s merged into ASARCO.
In May of 1901, Tutt and Penrose renamed and reorganized the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company into the Unites States Reduction and Refining Company. Their new offices were at 54 Wall Street in New York, now incorporated in New Jersey and capitalized at $10 million. In 1901, the Company was operating two modern chlorination plants known as the Standard and the Colorado, with 500 and 350 ton daily capacity, respectively. 1901 precious metal production in Colorado was way off, but not enough to deter Tutt and Penrose. Colorado gold production dropped by $1.14 million, silver by 2.05 million ounces.
In 1902-3 the company paid dividends quarterly of 1.5% on preferred stock and 1% on common stock. They had reduction works at three Colorado locales, Florence, Canon City, and Colorado City. About 1904, when Penrose and MacNeill left for the Utah Copper Co., new management took over. By 1908 the Company was listed as a 100 ton custom smelter, clearly having lost their market position, perhaps the result of the loss of the key players, Tutt and Penrose. Hayes may have also withdrawn or sold out at this point. J. D. Hawkins became the new president.
In 1915 the company fell apart. They defaulted on interest on loans due Jan. 1, 1916 and the works were ordered sold at bankruptcy in May, 1916. No bidders came forth with the minimum $250,000 for all off the company’s mining properties, sampling plant, reduction works and offices. The Company fell into complete financial failure, dead forever.
J. A. Hayes continued his career as a banker in Colorado Springs. Along the way he became partners with another of the great Cripple Creek millionaires, David Moffat, the man behind the Anaconda Gold Mining Company. Hayes and Moffat, along with 11 others, became the first to incorporate and start a steam-generated power company in Colorado. The Central Colorado Power Company was the brainchild of Colorado Springs engineers Leonard Curtis and Henry Hine. The two needed strong financial backing, and Moffat and Hayes were brought in to strengthen the company’s Board.
The ingot bears the city name of Colorado City, which has the important distinction as one of the first of the Colorado settlements, having begun in 1859 at the onset of the Pike’s Peak gold rush. It had quickly become a supply center, and the name reflected the founder’s thought that the river was among the headwaters of the Colorado River. Several authors have cited this settlement as the first use of the word Colorado in this region. In 1861 it became the Territorial capital, only to have it removed to Golden the next year. While it was initially about 2 miles from Colorado Springs, it became engulfed into that city in the twentieth century.
[10/2010] https://www.icollector.com/Colorado-City-CO-Pueblo-County-c1890-Colo-Phila-Reduction-Company-Silver-Ingot_i9799417 ($18,600)
Silver Ingot From the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company of Colorado City, Colorado.
Cripple Creek is about 25 miles west of Pike’s Peak, in Central Colorado. Before the big gold rush, the area was used graze livestock by a few homesteaders. Cripple Creek got its name from drovers when a frightened calf jumped over a fence, landed in a gully and broke its leg.
A man named Bob Womack was one of the settlers in this area. He was basically a cowboy but he did some prospecting on the side. In 1874, he found some promising rock. On a whim he sent it to Denver to be assayed. It turned out to be $200 worth of gold per ton. He named the area where he found the rock Poverty Gulch. He spent the next 16 years before he found anything else of value. All his friends joked him about his so-called gold mine, but he took it good-naturedly.
Finally a man named Dr. John P. Grannis, a dentist, staked Bob some money. He would get one-half interest of anything Bob found. One day in the fall of 1890, Bob found a one-half inch streak of pale yellow rock. He thought it looked promising. He wrote down his name and the date, October 20, 1890, on a board and nailed it to a stake. Then he took some specimens into Colorado Springs to be assayed. Professor Henry Lamb estimated the ore at $250 per ton.
Womack put the chunks of gold into a furniture store window, hoping to attract investors. It worked, and soon thereafter, the Cripple Creek area became a major gold producing region. One of the successful individuals in the Cripple Creek area was Charlie Tutt who got a grubstake and located the C.O.D. Mine. Tutt did well when a French company bought the C.O.D. mine for $250,000. In December 1895, Charlie Tutt, Charlie McNeill, and Spec Penrose formed the Colorado, Philadelphia Reduction Company and pretty much dominated that business for awhile. Penrose would later go on to build the first auto road up to the top of Pike’s Peak.
The Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction company began operations in 1896, and was taken over by the U.S. Reduction and Refining company in 1904. Operations ceased in 1912, and the buildings were torn down, except the office and storerooms, both of which were brick.
This is a rectangular ingot from this long-forgotten Colorado mine. The name of the company and its location are stamped on one side in elaborate circa 1890s lettering, and the other side has the name J.A. Hayes stamped on it (Hayes presumably being the assayer). The sides are blank and no fineness or weight is given. The ingot measures 93mm x 32mm x 18 mm and weighs 571 grams. This may possibly be the only tangible remnant other than the brick office and storerooms of the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company. Of great interest (and value) to collectors of Western Americana.