By Amber McMahill

By the time Sylvia T. Smith arrived in Marble, Colo., in 1908, she was already a well-seasoned newspaper editor and political activist. At 42 years old, she was an outspoken supporter of both the suffragette movement and labor rights, two hot topics of the era. She served as one of the first female delegates for the 1894 Republican Convention only a year after Colorado women won equal suffrage by referendum.

She spent the previous decade in Crested Butte, in part, as the publisher of the Crested Butte Weekly Citizen and came to Marble with her printing equipment and supplies in hand. By May of 1909, she had taken over as proprietor and editor of The Marble City Times, a weekly paper that was circulated locally and mailed back East to stockholders of the Colorado Yule Marble Company (CYMC).

Marble was a booming mountain town in 1909. Three years prior, Colonel Channing Meek had arrived and taken control of the CYMC. By the time Smith appeared, he had completed the 709-foot-long Marble Finishing Mill, invested in a power plant to bring electricity to the town, and donated the stone for a Catholic Church. Marble had grown from a population of less than 200 to around 800, according to the 1910 census, that same year the payroll for the CYMC had between 500 and 600 employees on average. Marble was very deeply a company town and Col. Meek was its much-loved benefactor.

Few existed in Marble who were either not on the company payroll itself or dependent on someone who was on the payroll. This included the sheriff, deputies, rival newspaper editor Frost, and the preacher. The Crystal River San Juan Railroad also held close ties with the CYMC as Meek had been instrumental in bringing the line into Marble.

Smith used her editorial pen to poke at CYMC from the start, and she’d arrived at a lucky time for criticizing the company. Shortly after landing, a labor strike broke out in July of 1909. While this one was quickly resolved, the second strike in August lasted three months and resulted in 500 laborers striking. In addition to labor conditions, Smith criticized the company on many different fronts, including the safety of the tram, lack of a hospital (despite monies collected for one), and, most damaging of all, the accusation that Col. Meek was running a stock selling scam rather than a legitimate company.

In 1910, Col. Meek began to fight back by calling a gathering of businessmen to meet and voice their opinions on Smith, encouraging each man to relate his opinion. This meeting grew into the Marble Businessman's Association and soon backed the creation of a rival newspaper, The Marble Booster.

From the beginning, The Booster professed to be pro CYMC and pro-business. In fact, that is where the name “booster” came from: To boost the com- pany and town. In short, it was a company paper. The editor, Frank Frost, wrote articles touting the company's generosity and progress while making jabs at Smith. The Marble City Times jabbed right back, and nearly every edition contained at least one derogatory article towards the CYMC.

One point of contention Smith liked to hammer on was the location of the finishing mill. Old-timers had warned from the beginning that it was built right in the path of an avalanche, and in March 1912, Smith sounded the warning about a large sheet of snow just waiting to come down. On March 20th, it did just that, smashing into the fin- ishing mill doing considerable damage to both the mill and the company that fed so many mouths in Marble.

Smith's reaction, appearing in The Marble City Times on March 22, 1912, was nothing short of gloating:

Destiny kept her appointment and redresses many wrongs; Colorado Yule Marble Mill crushed like an eggshell by an ava- lanche; warnings unheeded; the compa- ny never will pay dividends; organized by strenuous promoters its stock selling scheme has carried desolation into many homes and written despair over many lives that cannot give worthless paper- back for hard-earned, life-time savings.

The article went on to mention that the company was short on funds and reiterated her accusations that the Eastern stockholders were about to lose all their investments. For Col. Meek, this was the last straw. The next day the company controlled The Marble Booster ran an inflammatory article in retaliation the following day, stating:

This pseudo newspaper has upon many other occasions attacked the Colorado Yule company, but it was thought that the present situation would call for a square deal from even the bitterest enemy of the company. As a matter of fact, the party who prints this sheet has no reason to attack the company at any time, except for the money there is in it, but to print a spiteful, goody-goody article when misfortune came like it did Wednesday morning is just about the last straw.

There was no rebuttal from Smith this time, as the March 22nd edition of The Marble City Times proved to be the last. On Monday, March 25th, a handbill was circulated around Marble, calling all residents to a meeting at the Masonic Hall. They didn't state the purpose, only that it was vital to the town.

Frost, of The Marble Booster, kindly took notes and printed a complete account of the meeting, much to Smith's future attorney's delight. Dr. Haxby, one of the two town doctors, spoke to the heart of matters at the meeting, saying, “My position, briefly, is that this woman is hurting every one of us. Every dollar that her articles divert from the support of this great industry here means a loss of part of that dollar to me and to every other person within the sound of my voice.”

The other town doctor, Dr. Swift, according to The Marble Booster, Vol. 2 No. 3, March 30, 1912, was more direct, “I have served on several boards of health where my duty was to abate nuisances such as a bad smell, dead horses, dead dogs, etc. — things that made people sick. I say to you, though, that never in all my experience have I met with anything so offensive and so badly needing abatement as this newspaper, so-called.”

One recurring accusation that persisted for years was the belief that Smith was a paid agitator, insinuating that unions or rival companies had sent to bring down the CYMC. The preacher spoke against her, the school principal spoke against her, and one after one, her former townspeople and neighbors got up to call for her removal from town. In all, 232 residents signed a resolution demanding her removal from Marble.

The next day, a committee of 15 men and two women, including Frost and the CYMC Chief Clerk W. R. Frazier, delivered the resolution to Smith, or rather, they tried to. Smith would have none of it and refused to listen or accept the printed resolution, turning on her heel and going to a neighbor's house.

They enlisted the help of Town Marshal Richard Mahoney, who happened to be paid monthly by CYMC, and Special Officer John Fisher, who was a guard at the mill. The following day, as Smith began working on the next edition, they arrived at the newspaper office. Mahoney and Fisher presented Smith with an order for her arrest signed by the mayor, who was employed as a machinist at the mill. Refusing to allow her to gather any of her possessions save for a travel bag and a check, they took her to the town jail. Smith never saw her printing press, personal possessions, copies of her newspaper, or subscription lists again.

It was Frost, Smith's biggest detractor, who was tasked with dismantling her life's work and locking her possessions, including her printing press — with the typeset for that day's paper already set — and copies of her newspapers, in the basement of the Kobey's Store.

Kobey's was located on the corner of Main and Center Street, an area that became Carbonate Creek after the mudslides of the 1940s took out that section of town. The last mention of the press was in a July, 3, 1915 article appearing in The Marble Booster and written by Frost himself, stating they were still locked up there. It might never be known what happened to them.

Smith spent the night in the Marble City Jail, a building that still stands today. In the courtroom accounting of her night, she mentions sleeping between the cell and the wall on a pile of clean laundry. Those familiar with the jail know what a tiny sliver of space that is.

In the jail, she met another infamous Marble woman, Mrs. J.J. Curley, hotel proprietor, and bootleg- ger. Mrs. Curley preferred jail time to fines and had taken up residence in the jail for several months. She shared her food and blanket with Smith, and it was her clean laundry Smith used as a bed.

The following morning at 4:35, she was put on a train to Glenwood, and it was the conductor who ended up buying her ticket out of town. After a 26-hour train ride, the delay due to a snow slide near Leadville, Smith arrived in Denver and immedi- ately hired an attorney and

filed suit in Gunnison County District Court against 37 individuals, the Town of Marble, The CYMC, and The Crystal River and San Juan Railway Company.

The suit came to trial a year later, and by then, Meek had met his demise in an acci- dent on the very tram Smith had warned was unsafe. Her attorneys used the whole article in The Marble Booster as their primary source of evidence.

In addition, three townspeople spoke up for her: Tom Boughton, George Stogshell, and Mrs. Marshy Woods. Mrs. Woods was the wife of W.W. Woods, one of the Town’s founders who owned the other half of town that the CYMC didn't own. They had, apparently, been close friends in the short time Smith resided in Marble, despite pressure from Col. Meek to have Mrs. Woods withdraw her friendship.

The defense had little evidence to work with; the judge had ruled that all evidence to her attitude against the company did not stand as a reason for their actions. It was based on if those actions had taken place.

From the beginning, the CYMC kept themselves out of the resolution and actions against Smith. The company was not named in the final judgment, and in the end, the jury found 14 of the defen- dants guilty of malice and awarded body judgments against them for $10,345 plus court costs of around $600 (about half a million dollars by today's standards).

This amount was divided amongst all 14 defendants, including Frost, the Town judge, doctor, Mayor Frazier, and Ida B. Carey, widow, and owner of two ice cream parlors. They appealed the decision, and it went to the Colorado Supreme Court, where the decision was upheld.

The following year brought near bankruptcies, garnishing of bank accounts, and forced sale of property, but by April 1916, the judgment had been paid.

Carey nearly lost the empire she worked so hard to build, managing to save her home from the public auction at the last minute with a $100 loan. Fundraising amongst the town’s folk was typical to help defendants keep their homes and assets. It wasn't until the sheriff took possession of The Marble Booster, now the only news source in town, that Frost spoke to the company's injustice allowing the townspeople to take the fall for them.

According to The Booster's issue that hit the stands July 3, 1915, Frost wrote, “To begin at the beginning then, in a statement of the facts — the inside facts, that did not come out at the trial, for reasons that will be stated hereinafter — the defendants in this case who have had to pay this judgment or the most of it, had no more to do with driving Sylvia Smith out of Marble than they had to do with driving Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.”

He went on to lay the blame entirely on Col. Meek, accusing him of dictating the order for her arrest and even using threats to get residents to sign the petition. He continued with details on how some who had refused to sign had lost their jobs and that Meek had promised the defendants the company would pay all costs.

Whether he would have kept this promise, we will never know; following Col. Meek's death, the company was now in the hands of J. Forrest Manning.

Little factual accounts exist of Smith's life after Marble and the lawsuit. There are rumors that she worked for The Denver Post, but they have no such records. She is said to have never returned to Marble; although, there is a claim that she did return wearing a pink dress and had a military escort.

The Marble Booster claimed she moved to a ranch in Paonia, but there is no record of her there either. The only other written post-Marble account of her that could be found was from the United Labor Bulletin, speaking of her work organizing labor unions.

There are still many questions about Sylvia Smith and her time in Marble, to which we might never find answers.

She was a woman either loved or hated. Some always believed her to be a paid agitator intent on destroying the town they worked hard to build. To others, she was censored and run out for speaking the truth against the most powerful entity in town.

Regardless, Smith and her story tell of the human element of Marble's history, where the actors are not painted in black and white but in mottled shades of errors and intentions.