Trinidad author Rich Alford releases local history book on the city’s past

The Bloom Mansion, the Baca House and the Barglow Building are not just museum stops in Trinidad. They are part of the backdrop for Rich Alford’s new book, Peaks and Valleys in Trinidad History, which The Chronicle-News highlighted on June 5 as a fresh local reminder that Las Animas County’s past still sits in plain view in its county seat.

That matters in Trinidad because history here is not abstract. El Corazon de Trinidad, the city’s National Historic District, was established in 1861 along the Santa Fe Trail, and the town later flourished from the late 1870s through the 1910s as the capital of southern Colorado’s coal-producing region. The city’s story still echoes through its preserved blocks, its museum district and the civic work that keeps those places in use.

Las Animas County, founded in 1866, has a population of just under 15,000. Even its name ties back to local geography and memory, coming from the Spanish name of the Purgatoire River, El Río de las Ánimas Perdidas en el Purgatorio, or the River of the Lost Souls in Purgatory. In a county that small, a locally written history book can travel quickly from personal memory to public reference.

History Colorado says the Trinidad History Museum occupies an entire city block and includes the Bloom Mansion, the Baca House and the Barglow Building. The Trinidad Pioneer Museum opened in 1955, and History Colorado took over the property and operations in 1961 after Arthur Roy Mitchell helped organize efforts to save the Baca House from possible demolition. That preservation impulse still runs through local institutions, including the Trinidad Community Foundation and ongoing historic-preservation work in Trinidad and Las Animas County.

Alford’s title suggests a book that is not limited to nostalgia. Trinidad’s history includes both prosperity and loss, and one of the starkest reminders is the Hastings Mine Explosion on April 27, 1917, which killed 121 coal miners and remains the deadliest mining disaster in Colorado history. A city that once powered southern Colorado’s coal economy now continues to interpret that legacy through museums, preserved buildings and community programming, including a 2026 collaborative mural project at the Trinidad History Museum. Peaks and Valleys fits that landscape, adding another local voice to the record of a place where the past still shapes the present.