Durango has been through many changes since its founding in 1880, but its colorful past lives on in pastel, sun-kissed markings on buildings along downtown Main Avenue.
Ghost signs – hand-painted advertisements faded by weather and time – are symbols of the boom-and-bust cycles that defined Durango’s early history.
A watchful eye can still spot the promotions of old banks, newspapers and early automobile shops in downtown Durango that long ago closed, moved or changed hands.
Try to spot these three notable ghost signs for a glimpse into the city’s past.
For a century, large black lettering on the south-facing side of The Garage at 121 W. Eighth St. has advertised the bygone business Durango Novelty Works, one of the first – if not the first – automotive garages in Durango.
Durango artist Mariah Kaminsky was hired by the Newman Building in April to give The Garage a face-lift, updating the lettering in its original style and preserving its reminder of an age when the automobile was an emergent technology.
“You could just barely see a little bit of the layout, which was helpful,” Kaminsky said.
Examining the original lettering with help from fellow artist Laurie Cullum was like an archaeological dig, she said.
She referenced historic photos of Durango Novelty Works and digitally planned her restoration of the black lettering. It was a challenge, she said, given that the original font was truly unique – no modern typeset perfectly matches it today. But she was up to the task.
“It sounds cliché, but it's important to remember where we came from, where Durango came from, how it started, and the innovation that was involved in building this city,” Kaminsky said.
She said the restoration is a way to honor Durango’s past and acknowledge its development over the decades.
According to the La Plata County Historical Society’s “History La Plata,” Durango Novelty Works was purchased by Ben Hocker and his son Jess from Orville Chapman in 1911 and, within four years, moved from the 1100 block on Main Avenue to 125 W. Eighth St.
The Newman Building on the 800 block of Main Avenue is rich with history as well. It was built in 1891 by Charles Newman.
The building’s first tenant was Smelter National Bank, according to the La Plata County Historical Society. A piece of that legacy lives on in the form of a ghost sign on the back of the Newman Building, positioned to be visible to railroad passengers.
Smelter National Bank was headed by David Moffat and William Thatcher, said Charlie DiFerdinando, visitor services manager for the Animas Museum.
In 1897, just five years after opening, Smelter National Bank and several other Durango banks permanently closed their doors.
Founded in 1880 to serve nearby mining operations in the San Juan Mountains, Durango underwent rapid economic and population growth during its first decade of existence, becoming the central metropolis of Southwest Colorado, DiFerdinando said. Gold and silver mined during that era funded much of Durango’s historic downtown construction, and owners of that wealth stored it in banks like Smelter National.
In 1893, the city’s fortunes shifted when the Panic of 1893 sparked a worldwide recession that lasted most of the remaining decade – the worst economic downturn until the Great Depression of the 1930s, he said.
Mining-dependent areas like Southwest Colorado were particularly hard-hit by the repeal of the Sherman Silver Sherman Purchase Act in 1893, which caused silver prices to plummet.
What followed, DiFerdinando said, was a tale as old as banking: As panic set in, depositors rushed to withdraw their savings while debtors defaulted on their loans. Unable to fork up what they owed, Smelter National Bank struggled to stay solvent as the recession deepened, eventually going under in 1897, alongside numerous other Durango banks and businesses as a boomtown went bust.
To spot this ghost sign, stand at the northwest corner of Main Avenue and 11th Street and look above Durango Craft Spirits, 1120 Main Ave., at the south-facing wall of the Wells Group, 1138 Main Ave.
While all that remains today are marginally legible black smudges, this was once the sign for The Durango Herald-Democrat – the direct precursor of The Durango Herald – and a reminder of a time in Durango’s history when differences in opinion could end with blood running through the streets, according to local historian Duane Smith’s book Condemned by Many, Read by All (Durango Newspapers 1880-2008).
According to the National Registry of Historic Places, the building at 1138 Main Ave. was constructed around 1890 and 1891 and originally housed the Windsor Hotel, which continued lodging tenants on the second floor as the Windsor Rooming House into the early 1920s.
In the mid-1910s, the Durango Democrat moved its printing presses into the building, which became the office of the Democratic Printing Co. and Herald Publishing Co. until shortly after The Durango Herald-Democrat was purchased by the Ballantine family in 1952, Smith wrote.
According to Smith, the Herald-Democrat’s two ancestral papers, the Herald and the Democrat, shared a decades-long rivalry, each competing to be Durango’s premier newspaper before both were purchased by the same buyer.
The rivalry stemmed largely from political and personality clashes between the papers’ editors. The Democrat, originally the Solid Muldoon, moved to Durango from Ouray in 1892 with its editor Dave Day, a rambunctious man and staunch Democrat remembered for his love of “plug tobacco and hard liquor,” according to Smith. Day was enticed to move by local Democrats.
Meanwhile, under the ownership of the Raymond family between roughly 1897 and 1916, the Herald remained a staunchly Republican paper, none too fond of Day’s rabble-rousing, muckraking and at times sensationalist style.
The two newspapers’ personal and political differences finally came to a head in 1922 when Day’s son, Rod, and the Herald’s city editor, William Wood, exchanged gunfire in the middle of Main Avenue, costing Wood his life.
According to Smith, the details leading up to Wood’s death vary depending on which newspaper someone reads, but both editors had allegedly stalked one another around town after accusing each other in print of violating Prohibition.
While Day survived and was acquitted, Wood's death irrevocably damaged both Day’s and his newspaper’s reputations, contributing to the Democrat being purchased by the McDevitt family in 1928 after they’d purchased the Herald from the Raymond family 12 years earlier.
According to Smith, following the merger, the Herald-Democrat maintained Republican leanings. In the end, Rod Day may have survived, but it cost his family their decades-long battle of newspapers and ideas.
