Anna Leigh Ames Frohlich
By Anna Lee Ames Frohlich Researcher, Western Historian, Writer, Presenter / Speaker
“A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top.” – misattributed to Mark Twain.
The gleam in men’s eyes at the thought of gold in the Rockies did not end with the 19th century. As a matter of fact, in 2011 the gleam is alive and well. With the rise in the price of minerals, there is international interest in valuable properties in Colorado and elsewhere. That gleam had been in the eyes of my father, Lawrence Ames Nowell, for a long time.
His decision to move West was based on this long time passion. His father would not send him to M.I.T., where he wanted to go to study mining engineering, because “no one who is anyone goes anywhere but Hahhvahd.” Dad completed his undergraduate work and a master’s degree in business at Harvard before fighting in WWII.
Oakes Ames by Matthew Brady
During the war his mathematical skills paid off in the trenches. The long nights there were described by him later as interminable boredom punctuated with moments of sheer terror. Poker filled in the time, and dad’s gambling ability paid off. He would send his winnings home to mother with instructions on how to invest them. By the time he returned home he had enough from his earnings to buy a new car and put down a down payment on a house in Old Greenwich, Conn.
He worked for Johns Manville and General Foods in New York but was never really happy, When at age 35 he came into a very generous inheritance from his grandmother (about $1.5 million from the Ames Shovel fortune), he pulled up stakes and moved the family to the West where he could pursue his dreams.
We lived in a large, comfortable house in the Park Hill neighborhood of Denver. Mother had a nanny for the baby and to help with cooking, cleaning and ironing. This allowed her to spend a lot of time with her five children. We had family outings in the mountains, and mother would take us back to Massachusetts to spend time with our grandparents in the country.
Meanwhile, dad was feeling his way into the mining business. He had business skills but no real knowledge of the mining business. I have vague memories of going to one of his mines near Montezuma in the Snake River valley in Summit County. I can picture climbing up a mine dump that had a corrugated building off to one side. That area is known for silver deposits. The first silver discovery in Colorado was 1 mile south of Montezuma in 1864. I also remember the mention of “molybdenum,” which is a mineral used to toughen steel. The word stuck with me. It rolled off my tongue and over my lips.
He often mentioned the names of his mining partners, and I met a few of them. Mother would not let them come to the house. She considered them hard and “not the right type.” It seems that she was right in a way. His dreams did not survive for long. Lack of knowledge, partners who led him in wrong directions and used his money for their gambles in the mining industry, and just plain bad luck conspired to wipe out his inheritance in about three years. He was certainly not the first to lose it all in the mining business in Colorado. In the 1800s, only a handful made it big. Some earned enough to make a bare living, and the rest just faded into obscurity.
Larry and Betty Nowell, 1941, shortly after their marriage and before he went overseas Photos courtesy of Anna Lee Frohlich
Dad’s loss was probably hardest on my mother. She continued to talk about how he had managed to “pour his inheritance down a hole in the ground.”
Dad went back to his business training and worked in banking for the rest of his working years. Despite their hard start, they stayed in Colorado and grew to love the West and to take on its ways, though a part of their Eastern roots was always strongly ingrained in them.
Lawrence A. Nowell and his daughter Anna Lee in 1983
A few years ago while doing research on different family matters at the Western History section of the Denver Public Library, I came across a newspaper article that added an almost spooky element to dad’s mining experience. The article was in the June 9, 1866, Rocky Mountain News. It referred to the Bullion Consolidated Mining Company of Colorado. Listed among management from New England was the Hon. Oakes Ames of Union Pacific fame, my father’s great-great grandfather. The company had holdings in Clear Creek County and Summit County. In Summit County the company had “74,700 feet upon lodes in Ten Mile and Snake River Districts,” and 16 water power claims of 250 feet in the Snake River District.
How strange that my father should have been led from New England to the same river valley in Colorado where his ancestor had had a mining venture close to 90 years before. It is highly unlikely that he could have known about it. Was this coincidence or the hand of fate?
I, for one, am glad that he was led to Colorado, as the West and it’s history, and my family’s role in it, have become my passion.
