My Take
DiVoran Lites
God says,” Honor your father and mother that your days will be long on the earth.” Although the Bible says we shouldn’t worship our ancestors or get too tangled in studying their lives, remembering them like this is a way of honoring them.
Our friend Patricia sent us a video entitled “The last Boom Town, Creede Colorado.”
Bill sent the video to my brother in California. It was a complete story about mining towns and the people who lived in them.
Have you checked lately to see whether you’ve ever had miners in your family? They are all over the world, you know.
After my husband sent the video, my brother wrote back about our great-grandparents in another mining town, Paonia, Colorado. He wanted to know who it was that he recalled being there. Our great-grandmother was buried there. I wrote him back and told him the story of the family trekking from Illinois to Colorado in 1921 when our dad was only five years old. I’m sure dad had told it, but it was a long time ago. Granddad traveled to Paonia because it was a wonderful place to raise food and cattle. The friend that had told him about the area was a miner along with the other males in their family. We met some of them in 1983, and they showed us some of the rocks from the mine.
Counting Pa, thirteen people traveled for a long time from Illinois and had plenty of flat tires to fix. They had the necessary foods such as flour and salt in the big old stake truck and could sometimes find small woods along the road. They slept wherever they could find a place, for the small ones, sometimes it was under the truck.
Many years later, when Mother and Dad were both in Heaven, my brother sent me, as requested, all the old family photos and Mother’s writings about everything having to do with the family. I have loved going over them for all the years I’ve had them. And I have been surprised at all the people we know who were tied to the mines in one way or another.
I met Patricia Franklin when we were in second grade in another mining community. We have kept in touch ever since. The area where we lived was two towns a mile apart. One was a mining town, and the other more of a support town.
My friend Patricia’s family, meets every Memorial Day in a beautiful little cemetery on the floor of a valley near the mountains. Covid messed the reunion up for a while, so I hope they’ll be able to go this year.
About the video, Patricia says this:
“This is a great video about Creede. My Grandmother and her Dad were there during the silver boom. My grandmother taught school there around 1892, the year Bob Ford shot and killed Jesse James. My great-granddad worked for several years at “the Creede Candle,” the local newspaper, and was the “Spar City Spark” publisher. Spar City was a little town northwest of Creede. He, John David Vaughan, was quite active in promoting the mining of silver in Colorado back then.”
DiVoran again.
Having just read the novel, Prayers for Sale by Sandra Dallas and discussing it at our church Book Chat, I realized that my brother and I had a mining family that lived in the mountains in Breckinridge, Colorado, in about 1887. Our great grandmother, Dora Bell Morgan, and her husband Frank Samuel Morgan lived and worked in the mining town, and I imagined that Dora Bell’s life was like Hennie’s, the heroine of the book.
Our son-in-law’s grandfather was involved in the mines in West Virginia, and a church friend’s father was too, in Pennsylvania.
My dad did a stint in a Molybdenum mine in Leadville Co.
All those mentioned had ties to the mines. It was a pitifully difficult life, but it enabled them to survive.
DiVoran has been writing for most of her life. Her first attempt at a story was when she was seven years old and her mother got a new typewriter. DiVoran got to use it and when her dad saw her writing he asked what she was writing about. DiVoran answered that she was writing the story of her life. Her dad’s only comment was, “Well, it’s going to be a very short story.” After most of a lifetime of writing and helping other writers, DiVoran finally launched her own dream which was to write a novel of her own. She now has her Florida Springs trilogy and her novel, a Christian Western Romance, Go West available on Amazon. When speaking about her road to publication, she gives thanks to the Lord for all the people who helped her grow and learn. She says, “I could never have done it by myself, but when I got going everything fell beautifully into place, and I was glad I had started on my dream.”
Old Things R New 
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