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This article first appeared in The Rocky Mountain News on Saturday, January 7, 1984.  It serves as an excellent introduction to the Molly Brown's Unsinkable Neighborhood Walking Tour.

"Capitol Hill blossoms from prairie"

By MIKE McCARTHY

Once the land was wilderness -- prairie rolling eastward from the edge of the young city.  To the people of Denver, it was a breeding ground for dust storms and prairie dogs, a wasteland of brickyards and cemeteries.  It was a place, they said, where no one would ever live.

And yet, in Denver's fourth decade, the prairie blossomed into one of the most important neighborhoods in the West -- Capitol Hill.

It was here, at 1133 Penn, that Josiah Fleming, general manager of the Daniels and Fisher Dry Goods Co., built his $20,000 Greek Revival mansion in 1893.  Fleming and other owners of the home -- New Yorker George Brand, president of the Northern Coal Co., and Charles H. Hanington, president of Mountain Motors Co., -- typified the influx of wealth and power into a neighobrhood so new it barely had trees.

LITTLE is known of Fleming.  His home was designed specifically to look like a Greek temple.  It blended perfectly with the wildly eclectic architectural styles found on Capitol Hill.

The Fleming family -- Josiah and his two grown children -- owned the mansion until 1925, but the home was lived in by others.

George Brand, a 31-year-old New Yorker, lived there at the turn of the century with his wife and two stepdaughters.

Charles Field was a young newlywed when he moved into the home in 1901.  Field worked briefly as an assayer before moving to Boston.

The most  prominent resident of 1133 Penn was Charles Harrington Hanington, president of the Mountain Motors Co. when he moved into the house in 1914.

Hanington was a Denver native who graduated from East High School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

He founded Mountain Motors after a long career in smelting and mining in Colorado.  During the decade he lived at the Fleming House, he became a major social and economic figure in Denver.

THE CATALYST for development of Capitol Hill was Henry Gordon Brown from St. Clairsville, Ohio, who came to Denver in 1860 with $2,500 and dreams of greatness.  For $2.50 an acre he bought a nine-by-three-block swath of land where it swelled to a low crest east of the city.

From Broadway to Grant Street, and East 11th to East 20th avenues, he claimed a homestead, built a small cabin, and cultivated the dry earth.  In time, deciding that selling the land was more profitable than digging it, he subdivided it.

In the 1870s, the only things built on "Brown's Bluff" were a few farmhouses, and the handful of streets that crisscrossed the bluff -- all of them named by Brown -- were little more than wagon trails leading nowhere.  But the developers were patient, confident of the future.

Then came the silver rush, and when it was over, the silver kings came from Leadville and Silverton and Aspen to Denver -- to live in luxury, to flaunt their wealth.

Gold kings came from Cripple Creek, and bankers, industrialists, and merchant princes came from everywhere else.  And all of them chose Henry Brown's bluff -- "Capitol Hill" -- as the place they would build their castles.

In 1887, Horace Tabor bought John W. Bailey's lavish home at 1260 Sherman St., launching a land rush across the top of the hill.  Mansions sprouted like prairie sunflowers, including the Fleming House.  A neighborhood was born.

In the years ahead it would be home to the poor and the ordinary, but chiefly it would be a haven for the rich.  In time, on it and around it, they would create a world of their own.

The old Brown homestead was the heart of the Hill, but it spread as far south as East Ninth Avenue (in later years to Sixth) and as far east as Josephine Street.  Its westernmost streets -- Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Logan (originally named Kansas), and Pennsylvania -- were among the richest in America, maybe in the world.

And there were residents.

RAILROAD MEN David Moffat and David Dodge, business tycoons Dennis Sheedy, Chester Morey, William G. Fisher, Crawford Hill, jurists Moses Hallett, Owen LeFevre, James Benedict, Govs. James B. Grant and Jessie McDonald, and mining men from James J. Brown and John Campion to the mighty Tabor all filled the Hill's dusty blocks with the biggest, gaudiest, ugliest, most breathtaking palaces of brick and stone the West had ever seen.  Then, behind their castle walls, they lived lives of spelndid isolation, touring, operagoing, partying, clubbing, socializing, as if there were no world other than their own.

But, of course, there was -- even on the Hill itself.  For every Thomas Croke French chateau there was an ordinary flat.  For every Lafayette Campbell antebellum estate there was a shack.  For every silver king there was a black coachman, for every social queen, a Swedish maid or a widow from Chicago.

Even by the turn of the century, Capitol Hill presented an intriguing cross-section of society.

The elite, true, were most in evidence.  But the Hill was also the home of Gen. Frederick Funston, hero of the Philippine Insurrection, of movie pioneer Harry H. Buckwalter, of the original Gibson Girl, and the part-time home of Louis Comfort Tiffany, who filled his mansion with dazzling stained glass.

John Bell, Denver's first black policeman, lived in a Pennsylvania Street apartment, and Barney Ford, the "Black Baron," in a small Victorian home on High Street.  Some of Capitol Hill's families claimed blood ties to U.S. Grant, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, and Buffalo Bill.

Others had ties to no one.  It was here, at 1252 Clarkson St., that two "Protestant sisters" advertised for a "Protestant  seamstress," and it was here that a man invented a fountain for dogs, where a clergyman argued for spittoons on every street corner, where the Denver Post advertised a "three-room house, two lots, elegant place for chickens," where one man was fined for walking naked down Pearl Street and another for allowing a dead horse to lie on his lawn for three days.

It was here, in a small stone home on Downing Street, that John Christensen filled his walls with bullet holes to let out the witches that haunted him.