European Workers Recruited for Colorado Coal Mines

In the late 1800s, fast-growing American railroad companies needed cheap labor to mine coal to fuel their engines and the American economy. Recruiters were sent to poor European villages where they praised the wonders of America. It didn’t take much to convince my grandfather, Raffaele LaRosa, and his brother Ignazio LaRosa to immigrate to the United States.

Born in San Biagio Platani, Agrigento Province, Sicily, they had heard about good jobs in Colorado coal mines from others in neighboring villages and their own paesani who had already been recruited to the United States.

Ignazio was a master musician and was invited to be the music director for the Hasting’s camp town. His job was to provide social life for the miners in the camp towns. The brothers both went to Hastings around 1900-1901, where Raffaele worked as a laborer in the coal mines.

They both returned to San Biagio a few years later. But Raffaele returned to the United States, this time going to Chicago in 1909. In 1910 his wife Rosalia Cacciatore and three children - Rosa, Salvatore, and Gaspare (my father) joined him in Chicago. The next year another child was born in Chicago: Francesca LaRosa was born on Sept. 2, 1911. Then Francesca’s baptism is recorded at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Trinidad, CO, just one month later, on Oct. 8, 1911! It’s so very difficult to imagine my grandmother traveling on a train for days with a newborn infant and three small children in tow, from Chicago to Trinidad within just weeks of giving birth! The jobs were apparently more lucrative in the coal mines than in Chicago at the time.