555 County Rd History - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Milo Ownership, 1947-1954; Discussion of Date of Construction Tom Milo purchased the property at 555 County Rd. in 1947. He was born in Macedonia in 1888 or 1891 (by different accounts) and came to the U.S. in 1907. Census records place him in southern Colorado in 1920, and recorded County records show that by 1924, he was working as a miner at the Monarch Mine just to the south of Old Town Louisville. The federal census records for 1930 and 1940 place him at what appears in both cases to be the Monarch Mine camp, where his monthly rent in 1930 (split with another miner) was $4 per month and in 1940 was $3 per month. Items in Louisville Times issues in 1944 and 1945 stated that in the process of his becoming a U.S. citizen, his name was officially changed from Tripon Miloshoff to Thomas Milo, the name that he was already going by. The Boulder County website gives the date of construction of the original part of this house as being 1950. Since Boulder County records are sometimes in error with respect to the construction dates of historic buildings in Louisville, other evidence needs to be looked to. Most typically, a construction date given on the Boulder County website for a Louisville structure draws directly from the 1948 County Assessor card for that property. In this case, however, the 1948 County Assessor card does not give a date, but the fact that that there was a card filled out for the house at 555 County Rd. in 1948 suggests that a house must have been standing on the lot at that time. Also, the County's date of 1950 contradicts other information acquired from interviews of former Monarch Mine camp residents to the effect that Tom Milo, a miner at the Monarch Mine, moved the house to 555 County Rd. from the Monarch Mine camp in about 1947 when that mine closed. This would mean that the house had to have been built before that time. (The Monarch Mine opened in 1908, and its camp was a longtime place of residence for workers and their families. This mine camp is believed to have originally had approximately twenty houses at its location across US 36 to the north from Flatiron Crossing Mall.) This information about Milo having moved 555 County from the Monarch Mine camp was obtained from the May 2007 interview of Dorothy Berry Varra (1920-2018), Phyllis Berry Waters (1923-2020), and Wes Berry (1931-2013), were siblings who grew up in and around the camp. (For more information about the common practice of relocating buildings, see the "Here Today and There Tomorrow: Louisville and Its History of Relocating Buildings" in the Fall 2011 issue of the Louisville Historian. Another building known to have been relocated from the Monarch Mine camp was the one that stood next to 555 County Rd. at 557 County Rd., which was moved there by the Davis family, according to Jay Davis in a 2005 interview.) Tom Milo first appears in Louisville directories as living at 555 County Rd. in 1949, another apparent indication that the house was there before 1950. 3