THE MOUNTAIN SUBMARINE: Nautilus to be unveiled next summer in Central City after 40 years

Impossible, you say? The legend of the mountain sub is incredulous from beginning to end – and the end of this 112-year old saga will be next summer. Why a talented engineer began building a submarine 1,200 miles from the closest ocean and 8,500 feet above sea level is a question that has never been answered and probably never will be. But he did build a submarine in the 19^th century and this is his story.

By 1898 Central City was no longer the epicenter of lucrative mining in Colorado. In the nearly 40 years since prodigious amounts of gold were discovered in Gilpin County, other towns had boomed to life in Colorado – Leadville, Aspen, Creede, even the last and greatest gold strike of Cripple Creek – but Central and Black Hawk were still active mining and milling towns that provided a good livelihood for thousands of people.

Rufus Owens was a hard worker, an engineer with a flair for designing useful projects such as the water distribution system of Central City. His wild idea formed in 1896, and he enlisted two local physicians to invest in his submarine. Using his plans, two local contractors, William Lamont and Fred Ballard, began building the mountain submarine.

The Board of the Gilpin Historical Society decided that no pre-Grand Unveiling photos of the sub would be allowed, so yes, it is mostly covered. It will be ready for viewing on Memorial Day weekend, 2011.

The contractors secretly built the Nautilus, as Owens called it, in a shed behind the Eclipse Livery Stable on Lawrence Street. The name was not very original, as two famous submarines had already used the name – Robert Fulton’s sub and Jules Verne’s craft. Owens’s plans specified a vessel 19 feet long, 42 inches wide and 5 feet high in the center. This wood frame of hand-hewn lumber was fastened with handmade square nails. It was then sheathed with irregularly shaped sheets of thin iron, 1/8 of an inch thick, soldered at the seams.

On a lovely autumn Sunday afternoon in 1898, Owens hired Oscar Williams, owner of the Williams Livery Company, to transport the submarine to Missouri Lake for a test run. This lake is across from the current Gilpin County School, about 3 miles north of Black Hawk and easily visible from CH 119. The longest flatbed wagon in Williams Livery, one that could hold 100 bales of hay and was the biggest in town, was a few feet short, but the four-horse team hauled it up the gravel road that preceded CH 119 and backed the rig up into the water.

Owens began crawling into his submarine, but the few onlookers were fearful for his safety and talked him into filling the sub with rocks instead. Unmanned on her maiden voyage, the Nautilus floated out a number of feet and promptly sank. Apparently the 1,500 pounds of stones were too much ballast.

The legend of the ill-fated Central City submarine began after her active duty career. Her creator left town and disappeared from memory and local history, leaving the Nautilus resting on the floor of the 4-acre lake. Her existence began to be doubted, although an occasional ice-skater on Missouri Lake would see the craft in the shadowy depths, lying on her side about 15 feet under the surface.

More local residents became believers in the legend of the sub when the Chain O’Mines Company partially drained the lake in the early 1930s, entirely exposing the ghostly sub. Someone even stole her square hatch cover during its exposed time! But soon the lake refilled and 10 years passed. With World War II and the exploits of submarines capturing the front pages, more curiosity about the mountain sub reached the ears of Fred DeMandel. This Central City native had been among the small group who had seen the vessel being built behind the Eclipse Livery Stable nearly 50 years before, and he set about locating and retrieving the mysterious craft.

In January 1944, DeMandel and a stamp mill watchman named Walter Hammond began probing the lake. They first sawed more than 100 holes in a 400-square-foot section of ice measuring 14 inches thick. At first they only located sunken logs, but on Jan. 11, DeMandel spotted the Nautilus, referring to it as  “a big fat cigar.” Suddenly the local sub became a celebrity. A day was set to winch it up from the lake; School Superintendent Elizabeth Parfet declared a half-day holiday that day and the county courthouse and many businesses also closed. The McKenzie Trucking Company of Nederland was hired to bring the submarine up.

On the fateful day, Jan. 25, 1944, a 20-foot diameter hole was cut in the ice above the sub. The trucking company vehicle, equipped with a seven-ton capacity winch, parked on the lakeshore and was secured via ropes and log chains to pine trees nearby. A steel tripod was erected above the submarine, and a chain was extended from the winch through the tripod and fastened to the sub’s nose, but the chain soon broke away from the sub, and the nose was slightly damaged. The second try, however, brought the ghost ship up from its 46-year watery grave. The “300 spectators on the shore gazed in awe” and the Central City High School Band, in uniform, stood on the shore and played Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. It took only an hour to bring the sub to shore.

The original ballast rocks were still inside. Five 5-foot iron rods protruded from both sides of the sub; their function was uncertain and still is. The sub was hauled to Central City and left in the yard behind Sheriff Oscar William’s garage to dry out. When it did, DeMandel put the submarine in his Central Gold Mine & Museum for public display; in the early 1950s another local resident, Mona Robb, acquired it and displayed it in her museum. Later she sold it to William C. Russell Jr., longtime resident, mayor and newspaper publisher. Russell stored the mysterious sub in one of his warehouses, and it has not been seen for 40 years.

The good news is that you, Gambler readers, will be able to see the Nautilus next summer. The Gilpin County Historical Society purchased the sub from the estate of Bill Russell this summer and plans a Grand Opening in late May to proudly share the fabled submarine with Colorado residents. This is understandably the only submarine constructed in Colorado in the 19^th century – or before or after. To offset the cost of purchasing, moving and displaying the sub, the Society has begun an SOS Campaign. If you would like to contribute to the Save Our Sub Campaign, please contact the Society office at 303-582-5283 or send a check in any amount to POB 247, Central City 80427.