One of my favorite research tools is the 1878 Willits Map of Golden. It provides incredible detail about exactly what was here in that year. Check out this piece of downtown:
I knew that Dan Abbott (author of Colorado Central Railroad) had redrawn it from the original, but I had not known what inspired him to do that–so I asked! Here’s Dan’s story:
Back in the mid-1980s, both Francis Rizzari and Dick Ronzio were at the age of not driving at night anymore, so they appointed me to chauffeur them to the monthly Denver Westerners meeting.
In the course of these monthly outings Dick mentioned that he had an old Golden map he would like to have redrawn, and as he knew that I had done some of this kind of work previously, he commissioned me to redraw this particular historic item relating to Golden’s history.
I went to his house one day soon after this, and took charge of this original map to be redrawn. It was an original linen map in colored ink, which had been glued to a 24” x 36” piece of plywood with a Plexiglas sheet covering the front. The original linen had been folded in half and was a bear to decipher any detail around this fold.
It took approximately 120 hours to redraw this at its original size. When completed around the first of April in 1987, Dick took my original drawing and had it reduced to 18” x 22” and gave me a copy, which I in turn had about 100 copies made and sold these for a number of years thereafter.
Dan Abbott
