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The Mining Exchange Building at 8 South Nevada Avenue in Colorado Springs stands as one of the most architecturally distinguished commercial structures of the Cripple Creek gold rush era. Commissioned by mining magnate Winfield Scott Stratton and designed by architect T.E. Linn, the five-story edifice was completed in 1902 at the southwest corner of Nevada Avenue and Pikes Peak Avenue. As documented by the Society of Architectural Historians in its Archipedia entry on the building, the structure exemplifies the Beaux-Arts Neoclassical style, with piers separating fenestration bays and swags in heavy relief decorating spandrels between the floors. The facade is clad in golden brick—an allusion to the wealth that financed its construction—crowned by a boldly projecting bracketed cornice of carved Indiana limestone. The first level was later resheathed in travertine. Stratton, who had earned millions from his Independence Mine in Cripple Creek, conceived the building as what the SAH Archipedia described as a “temple of capitalism” designed to facilitate stockholder investment in the region’s mining enterprises. As noted in a feature by the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, the building was significant as the first fireproof office structure in Colorado Springs, constructed with solid concrete and metal framing. Following the decline of mining stock trading, the building served various commercial purposes before undergoing a major renovation in 2012 and again in 2024 under designer Chris Pardo of Elemental Architecture, transforming it into the Mining Exchange Hotel, now part of the Wyndham Grand and Registry Collection portfolios.
The interior decorative program of the Mining Exchange Building was conceived to project the grandeur and legitimacy of the mining stock trade during the Cripple Creek boom. The centerpiece was the three-story atrium trading floor, featuring a domed ceiling and brass-railed trading stations arranged beneath ornate metal staircases that rose to the fifth floor. As described in a 2015 Colorado Springs Gazette feature, the original trading floor accommodated approximately seventy men and several boys, who operated before a massive quotation board—perhaps fifteen feet tall—listing mining companies and their stock prices in chalk, illuminated from above by at least seven pairs of electric lights. Two twelve-foot ladders stood against the board for clerks updating prices in real time. The building also housed substantial vault rooms with heavy steel doors and safes, reflecting the exchange’s role as a repository for mining securities and financial documents. Original marble wash basins and ceramic tile floors spoke to the building’s aspirations toward permanence and respectability. A notable 1896 chromolithograph by the Western Lithographic Company, now held in cartographic collections and catalogued by Geographicus Rare Antique Maps, depicts the Board of Trade and Mining Exchange with views of the Cripple Creek district, the Independence Mine shaft diagram, corner cartouches displaying trading statistics, and a rendering of the proposed Stratton building—an invaluable visual record of how the exchange presented itself to potential investors. In the 2024 renovation overseen by Elemental Architecture, many original features were preserved or integrated into the hotel design, including the vault doors and a curated display of vintage mining stock certificates in the lobby.
Colorado Springs occupies a singular position in the geography of American mining finance. Founded in 1871 by General William Jackson Palmer as a refined resort community at the foot of Pikes Peak, the city earned the nickname “Little London” for its cultivated atmosphere and popularity among British visitors. The discovery of gold on the western slopes of Pikes Peak in 1890—1891 by rancher Bob Womack transformed the city’s identity from health resort to mining capital virtually overnight. As Marshall Sprague documented in Money Mountain: The Story of Cripple Creek Gold (1953), the Cripple Creek mining district lay approximately twenty miles southwest of Colorado Springs, accessible by rail via the Colorado Springs and Cripple Creek District Railway. Rather than establish their residences in the rough mining camps of Cripple Creek and Victor, the mine owners, investors, and financiers chose to live in Colorado Springs, where Palmer’s carefully planned grid of wide, tree-lined avenues offered genteel surroundings. By 1901 the city’s population had doubled, and as the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum has documented, at least twenty-eight residents had become millionaires from Cripple Creek gold, earning the city the sobriquet “City of Millionaires.” The Mining Exchange Building anchored the financial district at the corner of Nevada and Pikes Peak Avenues, surrounded by banks, assay offices, and brokerage firms. Spencer Penrose and Charles Tutt, who made their initial fortunes from the C.O.D. mine in Cripple Creek, later used their mining wealth to build institutions that shaped the city’s modern identity, including the Broadmoor Hotel and the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.
The institutional history of the Colorado Springs Mining Exchange is inseparable from the Cripple Creek gold rush, the last and greatest mining boom in Colorado’s history. Gold was first discovered in the district in 1890 by rancher Robert “Bob” Womack, though as Frank Waters recounted in Midas of the Rockies: The Story of Stratton and Cripple Creek (1937), the rush gained momentum only after Winfield Scott Stratton filed his claim on the Independence Mine on July 4, 1891, and struck a rich vein worth three million dollars by 1893. As documented by James B. Copeland in “Mining Stock Exchanges and Financing the Colorado Mining Industry” (Mining History Journal, 2013), the Board of Trade and Mining Exchange of Colorado Springs was organized in May 1894 to provide a formal marketplace for shares of Cripple Creek mining companies. By 1894, three stock exchanges operated in Colorado Springs alone, reflecting the frenzy of speculation. Stratton, who sold the Independence Mine in 1899 for eleven million dollars, commissioned the Mining Exchange Building in 1901 to house a permanent exchange. At its peak, the exchange processed over thirty-four million dollars in annual stock transactions, making it the largest mining stock exchange in the world. The district’s production peaked in 1900, when 475 mines produced approximately 900,000 troy ounces of gold—two-thirds of total United States output, as recorded by the Mining History Association. The original Mining Exchange operated until 1925, when declining ore grades and falling gold prices diminished trading activity. A successor institution, the Colorado Springs Stock Exchange, was organized soon after and continued operations until January 1967. By its final years, the New York Times characterized the Colorado Springs trading floor as “the nation’s sleepiest securities exchange,” recording only 284 transactions and 414,268 shares traded in 1962.
The Colorado Springs Mining Exchange specialized in the shares of gold and silver mining companies operating in the Cripple Creek and Victor mining districts. Trading was conducted through a call market system on the exchange floor, where brokers gathered before the massive quotation board to buy and sell shares. Call sheets tracked daily prices and were published in the Colorado Springs Gazette-Telegraph for public consumption. Among the most prominent companies whose shares traded on the exchange were the Portland Gold Mining Company—whose Portland Mine produced sixty million dollars over half a century of operation—Stratton’s Independence Mining Company, the Vindicator Consolidated Gold Mining Company, the El Paso Gold Mining Company (the original Womack claim), and the Golden Cycle Mining and Reduction Company. As Copeland documented in his 2013 Mining History Journal article, the exchange functioned not merely as a secondary market but as a primary vehicle for financing exploration and development: mine operators issued shares to raise the capital needed to sink shafts, purchase equipment, and develop claims. The speculative character of the market was extraordinary. Many of the hundreds of companies listed were little more than paper enterprises, and stock prices could swing wildly on rumor or a new ore discovery. As Sprague noted in Money Mountain (1953), shares in some Cripple Creek companies appreciated between 1,000 and 10,000 percent in the early 1890s, attracting speculators from across the nation. At the district’s peak around 1900, Cripple Creek produced over 900,000 troy ounces of gold annually, valued at approximately eighteen million dollars. The exchange also listed shares of reduction and milling companies that processed ore, as well as transportation companies including the railroads connecting the mining camps to Colorado Springs.
Images will be added as the project develops. Photographs by Larry Ng and from research sources.