Stage passengers traveling from Central City to Denver dined at the Overland House in Golden, reputed to have one of the "best appointed and best supplied tables in the country." This hotel, being the renovated Hardy & Davis Block that had recently housed the Territorial Council (Senate, 1862-66), was put together by Cyrillus Ayers and Mr. and Mrs. Hermans in 1867, and it instantly became Wells Fargo's solution for a hotel in Golden. Here, at today's location of 1117 Washington Avenue, Wells Fargo set up its office, had its stagecoaches stop here, its passengers dine here, and the hotelkeepers be its agents.
East side of today's 1100 block of Washington Avenue
- 1867
Future Overland House is second from right
Building farthest right is future Buffalo Rose Saloon
Only the brick building (second from left) still exists today
Photo courtesy Golden History Center
As the railroads came to places back east, stagecoach transportation was pushed farther and farther west to new frontiers that needed it. With it came the legendary stage drivers of the east, two of whom settled in the Golden area, became agents of Wells Fargo, and ran two of the most noted hotels around: the Overland House and the Green Mountain Ranch. The fame of Lemuel Flower and Stephen Eldred outshone that of even Updike and Hawk. George West noted this, upon the death of Flower at Golden Gate's Michigan House in 1871:
Mr. Flower was born in the town of Ashfield, Mass., and connected with the various stage lines that then united the East with the West. He lived to see civilization on wheels, of which he was a ruling spirit, superceded by the iron steed. The duties develved upon him were onerous and often included great responsibilities, - well has he fulfilled them. He has gone to his reward, and no more honest and upright man has "left the precincts of the closing day" than our lamented friend.
The writer hereof well recollects him, when in the freshness of youth. There were "giants in those days." Henry Clay, with his "towering brow and eagle eye," Manifee of Kentucky, and Sam Houston of Texas; S.S. Prentiss of Misssissippi, Ewing of Ohio, Philip Doddridge, and a host of other shining lights of that period, journeyed over the road of which our lamented friend had the management. The writer hereof has frequently stood awe-stuck at the sight of sixty stage coaches under the manipulation and management of Lem Flower and Steve Eldred, now of the Green Mountain Ranche, Colorado, rumbling down the western slope of the Alleghanies, freighting the wisdom of the age!
Perhaps the best way to know what is was like to travel a route through Golden on a Wells Fargo stage is best described by one of its passengers on December 26, 1868. Upon leaving the Green Mountain House of Steve Eldred, he wrote "the scenery appeared more grand and of so much interest that I hung myself outside the coach by straps, and holding on the inside, looked up twice sometimes to see the tops of mountains, nearly breaking my neck." Continuing up into the mountains via Golden Gate, the passenger also noted the roadway itself, looking down "to watch for moss agates and pretty stones, and was frequently anxious to leave our coach drawn by six horses under a keen trot to gather them." Upon resting at a way station passengers could get out and walk about, as much as a mile or so, admiring the mountain scenery, and the scenery became grander the further they went into the mountains.