THE SPITE FENCE
Conversation with Sara Maxwell Baily, 1990
"Dr. Baily took this picture of Reese St. in about 1910 from his front yard. The image shows the Root house (later Maxwell) across the street and down the block with the Molighe house next door. The "Spite Fence" was built by Mrs. Lena Stoiber, the colorful mining queen, who not only had built the "Molighe" house, but also woned the vacant lot between it and the next house owned by the Hand family. Stoiber apparently had a feud with the Hands and had the "fence" built to annoy them. Stoiber build several spite fences around silverton when she lived there and their remnants were still there when we bought the Root house in 1920. This one, shown in Dr. Baily's photo, had been torn down by that time.
"Mrs. Stoiber, known as "Captain Jack," was one of the most controversial figures in mining activities of the period. Her husband, Ed, and his brother Gus were German mining engineers who developed the Silver Lake mine which was a fabulous producer of gold. Lena actually ran the operations, hiring and firing and ruling the fief with an iron fist. The Stoibers sold the Silver Lake about 1908 to the Guggenheims who operated it until the late 1920s when the Mayflower Co. took it over.
Mrs. Stoiber built a fabulous home up the canyon from Silverton. It was patterned after a German country estate and named Waldheim. Waldheim stood on a bluff near the railroad and was quite an impressive sight when viewed from the railroad. It was trashed in the 1930s and the lumber and etc. shipped to Durango where it was used by Claude and Evelyn Deering (ex-Silvertonites) to build a beautiful home.
The Silverton-Northern narrow-gauge railroad ran up the canyon and served the small settlements of Howardsville, Eureka, and Animas Forks until the 1930s when wagon roads were improved enough to accommodate the trucks. Lena Stoiber later built the so-called Humphrey's Mansion in Denver near Cheesman park.
Mr. Stoiber died in Paris and Lena married a captain in the British army. She was married four times. She died in Stressa, Italy, where she lived the last years of her life. According to Colorado people who visited her there, she had twenty dogs who ate around the table with napkins under their collars. One of her husbands was a lumber man from Washington state who went down on the Titanic. Lena Stoiber's only heir was a half-brother who lived across the street from us (Maxwell) His name was Alfred Harrison.
Merrill Dowd (later sheriff) told me that the last time she (Mrs. Stoiber) visited Silverton it was on the Saturday train. He had met the train and took her to the house to make sure the fence was still there, then turned around and went back to Denver. She had originally built the house to spite the Hands who lived next door to us. The fence even had a lean-to with animals on the side with the vacant lot. . This large fence was not there in 1920 when we bought our house.
Recent shot of the Maxwell/Root and Molighe houses shown in photo
above.
© 1999, N.Baily