tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034998384799920884.post6995056711606198751..comments2024-03-26T12:01:39.690-07:00Comments on A Family Tapestry: Life in the Two-Mile-High CityJacqi Stevenshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03471698670217119444noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034998384799920884.post-35128047631074052582018-11-19T13:13:23.007-08:002018-11-19T13:13:23.007-08:00Such a beautiful and touching post!Such a beautiful and touching post!IntenseGuyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02456182395472362760noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034998384799920884.post-80191492106892230282018-11-19T07:56:08.708-08:002018-11-19T07:56:08.708-08:00JJ Hagerman was my great-great grandfather. I liv...JJ Hagerman was my great-great grandfather. I lived with my grandmother (his granddaughter) the last few years of her life and grew up hearing lots of railroad stories. Gigi, as we affectionally called her (Elinor Hagerman), wrote poems and stories about (mostly) the natural environment for hours every day. She was working on a poem when she died at 94 about a part of her life that bothered her very much. The life of the miners was something that she didn’t like to bring up but it was always a source of sadness for her. When she was quite little, she was told about a miner that had died but could not be retrieved. He had fallen on a ledge that was out of reach. Miners would still go down past this man. I think she overheard the description from her father and it stuck with her forever. His body had some sort of amber crystals that had covered him. She thought of it as a sort of shroud that had protected him with a bit of dignity. Apparently nobody knew his name or who his family was—they thought perhaps he was from Mexico. What bothered her more was that a common term for miners were “peons”. Her poem was titled something like, “Peon in Amber”. I’ll re-post if I find it. I have it somewhere special because it was the piece she was revising the day she died. Gigi actually adored her grandfather and said that she hated all of the photographs of him because it never showed the twinkle in his eye or the curve of his smile he often held as he talked. Her favorite memories were going on the “Wildflower Excursions” on the trains with him. She was always aware of the miners’ lives and plights, though. Probably one of the many reasons she did not participate in high society her entire life. My father (now gone) had great memories of eating with the miners when he was a child. He remembered eating outside on long tables put together with everyone and his mother exchanging stories with the miners. In his mind, it was the best food he ever had. The mines influenced his love of geology—he studied the field for eight years and explored the geology of Aspen, Leadville, etc. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned about who JJ really was. I thought of him as a tycoon that couldn’t relate to people without money. In “The Life and Times of JJ Hagerman”, I learned that he grew up as a hard worker on his family’s farm. His father didn’t want him to waste any time in education and wasn’t allowed to complete anything outside of a few years in school. He befriended the Carnegie family through work and had them ask his father to allow him to pursue education. It was a struggle for him to catch up once he was granted permission but he found his way through a degree in business. After I read his history, he finally became a real person to me. His policies on how to deal with striking miners has been hard for all of my siblings because we were brought up with a different mindset. The lesson I teach my daughter is to really examine the life we lead now. What are we doing that in 100 years could be clearly seen as not right? What do we need to change? Do we treat people fairly and equally? There are still a lot of miners’ families in Colorado Springs and I enjoy getting to know their descendants and hearing stories. My favorite stories are about Gigi’s mother—she made it her mission to help especially children that had less than others. One woman wrote a little story about how my great grandmother had given her a bicycle and her very first ride in a car. It’s been important for me to look at all the positive and negative impacts of what people with wealth can have. It’s also important to see how sheer determination and hard work by so many paved the way for us today—from the miners to the farmers that became tycoons. How can we live our lives in a way that would honor the man that fell? Heather Loohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15724160389092875202noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034998384799920884.post-86881173780609391972012-05-04T07:58:22.076-07:002012-05-04T07:58:22.076-07:00It must have been never ending work for the women ...It must have been never ending work for the women in those days also. Many of them ran boarding homes for the miners, cooking on those iron stoves and doing laundry on washboards! I know that many of the men were gone for long periods of time moving from mine to mine. Redcliff nearby was another mining town and many traveled back and forth from Leadville. Drinking and gambling were also common in the mining camps. Many miner's wives ended up raising their children alone!Connie Lee McKay Martelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00403523156576872955noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034998384799920884.post-13864134123108051702012-05-04T07:10:08.082-07:002012-05-04T07:10:08.082-07:00There is one note that I found touching. Patrick ...There is one note that I found touching. Patrick the Priest obviously kept in touch with his far-flung family, never forgetting them in the process of building a large Church in Chicago. One is left to wonder how much he saw of them - he left home to go to Cincinnati, came home for a few short years and off he went. <br /><br />I found this:<br /><br />https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-266-11828-74656-58?cc=1325221 showing a Thomas Flannigan (spelled that way!) working as a RR laborer. Pitkin County is the home of Aspen, CO.<br /><br />Also, I found this:<br /><br />https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/M4L2-7SB<br /><br />Charles Flannigan, born 1850 in Ireland... could he be a missing brother?Intense Guyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08441598926026727682noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5034998384799920884.post-36142564700703955252012-05-04T05:18:09.491-07:002012-05-04T05:18:09.491-07:00I find it interesting to see that J J Hagerman als...I find it interesting to see that J J Hagerman also suffered from tuberculosis. He had enough money to go to Switzerland to recuperate, but was never the same afterwards.<br /><br />I don't want to harp on the theme, but boring a tunnel through granite, back in the day, was an arduous task and it took years - as many as 5-6-7 of them to "dig the bore". They used temporary track and trains to bring supplies to the tunnel diggers - who were often of "mining stock" (read: Irish or Chinese). Whatever John Flannigan did, could well have taken him away from home for extended periods of time. Even prosaic locomotive "driver" might be on the (rail)road for days on end.<br /><br />As you noted, the workdays (and work weeks) back then were "endless."Intense Guyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08441598926026727682noreply@blogger.com