Even during its boom times, the high desert community of Nucla has always been a small place.

It’s also been a beloved one, drawing and keeping people in search of different kinds of lives.

Marie Templeton’s father was one of them, moving his family to the area toward the beginning of World War II.

And Templeton, 89, would like to bust a misconception you may have about this remote corner of Montrose County. Even though it was once a well-known hub for uranium mining, its name has nothing to do with nuclear energy.

“Nucla was supposed to be the nucleus of this socialist bunch of people,” Templeton said.

That idealist bunch was the Colorado Cooperative Company, which Templeton spent years studying as a historian with the Rimrocker Historical Society. The CCC was a utopian society that sprang out of an economic depression known as the Panic of 1893, and one of several such communities that dotted Colorado in the 1800s. It offered the promise of a new life, one where everyone got the same fair shake and did the same hard work, all in a place far from everything they’d ever known.

Stina Sieg/CPR News Marie Templeton, probably Nucla’s best known keeper of local history, can talk for hours about how tied this area has been to mining for generations. But she also stresses that the success of this place is really about the hearty folks who’ve made their homes here, like her father and husband, both of whom worked hard in the uranium mines and later died of cancer.

When asked about the soul of Nucla, Templeton grinned with pride.

“Persistent is the best word I can think of,” she replied.

They had to be, she said, in order to dig Nucla’s famed 17-mile irrigation ditch, a project that took 10 years. In its early days, the town had a reputation for hard work, but also for music and art. Around the turn of the century, the area’s old newspaper, The Alturian, reported that locals held lively dances three times a week.

After only a few years, however, the collective broke up over fights about how equally the work was really shared. In particular, there was tension between the town’s founders, people who had actually dug the area’s famed ditch, and newcomers, who hadn’t had to put that sweat into the land.

After the discovery of radium in 1912, many residents transferred their can-do spirit from farming to mining.

“We’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it!” Templeton said, in a gleeful impersonation. “And that’s it!”

Courtesy of the Rimrocker Historical Society Nucla and neighboring Naturita have boomed and busted along with various mining operations since the beginning of the 20th century. The biggest boom was uranium, which started around the 1940s, when this photo was taken on Nucla’s Main Street.

By the time she and her family moved to neighboring Uravan in the early 1940s, the area was well on its way to becoming an important part of America’s march toward atomic weapons.

That meant jobs for locals.

“And these guys had been living poor all their life, and they finally had a good way to support their families,” Templeton said. “And so they worked in the uranium mines.”

With a few hiccups over the years, Nucla’s boom times would last through the 1970s — a radioactive gold rush.

Jerry Nelson, 60, remembers the promise of this place.

“I personally knew some guys walking around in bib overalls that were millionaires,” he said.