They called it Bessemer. Not the converter, although the converter is exactly where the name came from. The neighbourhood on Pueblo’s south side, just across the railway tracks from the Colorado Fuel and Iron mill, was named for the steel-making process that lit the night sky red for nearly a century. From the 1880s into the 1960s, if you turned off Northern Avenue and walked into the grid of frame houses and brick parish buildings, you heard Sicilian. You smelled tomato sauce, anise, and the iron tang from the mill three blocks away. You were in a southern Italian working town that happened to sit at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
The Place
Pueblo sits on the Arkansas River in southern Colorado, about a hundred miles south of Denver, where the high plains begin to roll up into the Wet Mountains. The Bessemer neighbourhood is on the south side, bounded roughly by Northern Avenue, the railway corridor, and the steel mill grounds themselves. The houses are mostly modest single-storey frame cottages and small brick bungalows, built fast for mill workers between 1881 and the 1920s. It was its own incorporated town for a stretch, founded in 1881 alongside the works and folded into Pueblo by the 1894 consolidation.
How It Became Italian
Before the Italians
The land that became Bessemer was open grazing and irrigated bottomland in the 1870s, with a small Hispanic and Anglo population in what was then four loosely connected settlements: Pueblo, South Pueblo, Central Pueblo, and Bessemer. The Colorado Coal and Iron Company chose the site in 1881 because the Arkansas River gave it water, two rail lines gave it access, and southern Colorado’s coal fields were a short haul away.
The mill fired its first blast furnace in 1882. A neighbourhood of shacks went up almost overnight, first called Taylorville, then Steelworks, then Bessemer once the houses got permanent.
The Italians Arrive
The first significant wave of Italians reached Pueblo in the late 1880s and 1890s, recruited by company agents who travelled to Italian ports and to existing Italian communities in the eastern United States. They were the first large immigrant group at the mill, ahead of the Slovenes, Croatians, Greeks, and others who would follow.
Most came from the south. The Sicilian contingent was the largest, particularly from the province of Trapani on the island’s western coast, with significant numbers from Campobello di Mazara, Marsala, and the surrounding agricultural towns. Calabria and Basilicata sent the next biggest groups.
The pull was simple. The mill paid steady wages in cash, the company built basic housing, and one cousin already at the plant could send for the next. Within a decade, chain migration had built whole streets where almost every household traced back to the same handful of Sicilian comuni.
Bessemer at Its Peak
By 1910 the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, as it had been rebranded after the 1892 merger, was the largest steel producer west of the Mississippi and the largest private employer in Colorado. Forty languages were spoken inside the mill gates. More than two dozen foreign-language newspapers circulated in Pueblo, including Italian-language weeklies.
The Italian families lived in Bessemer because that was where the work was and because their parish, their grocers, their barbers, and their funeral parlour were all walking distance. The men worked open hearth, blast furnace, rail mill, rod mill. The women kept gardens. Italian was the language of the kitchen, the corner store, and most of the back porches.
Catholic life centred on a national parish for the Italian community. Our Lady of Mount Carmel began as a mission in the late nineteenth century, with the Jesuit fathers ministering to Italian families in Bessemer, and was formally established as a parish in 1920. The church at 421 Clark Street became the social spine of Italian Pueblo: weddings, funerals, christenings, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel every July.
By 1920 roughly one in five Coloradans claimed Italian ancestry, and the densest concentration was in Pueblo.
The Change
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act effectively closed the door on new Italian arrivals, cutting the southern European quota to a trickle. The community kept growing through the 1930s and 1940s, but now by birth rather than by boat.
Then came the long decline of American steel. CF&I employed around 10,000 people in Pueblo at its post-war peak. By the 1980s, after foreign competition, recessions, and a wave of consolidations, the workforce was a fraction of that. The 1982 strike and 1990 bankruptcy reshaped the company. Italian-American grandchildren who had once expected to inherit a job at the mill went to college instead, or moved to Denver, Colorado Springs, or the suburbs north of town.
The neighbourhood did not empty out. It transformed. Hispanic families, many with deep roots in southern Colorado predating the mill, became the demographic majority. Italian families who had bought up in Bessemer through the 1920s and 1930s often sold to younger Hispanic households and moved north.
The Landmarks
Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church. 421 Clark Street. The mother church of Italian Pueblo. Begun in the late 1890s as a Jesuit mission to Italian immigrants, formally established as a parish in 1920, and still active. The annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in July remains the most visible Italian-Catholic celebration in Bessemer.
Steelworks Center of the West. 215 Canal Street. The official museum and archive of the CF&I story, housed in the company’s old medical dispensary, built in 1901. The archive holds more than 100,000 photographs and tens of thousands of maps, including company records of Italian recruitment and the immigrant workforce. It is the closest thing to a serious Italian-American heritage site in the city.
Gray’s Coors Tavern. 515 West Fourth Street. A working-class bar that opened in the same Bessemer-adjacent corner of downtown after Prohibition. Run for nearly fifty years by the Greco brothers as Johnnie’s Coors Tavern starting in 1934, the bar is best known nationally as the birthplace of the slopper, the open-faced burger smothered in green chile that became Pueblo’s signature dish. The Italian sausage hoagie on the menu is a quieter signal of the same heritage.
Gus’s Place. 1201 Elm Street. A Bessemer dive bar in a building that started life as a small frame church in 1892. Gus Masciotra, a Sicilian immigrant, bought it in the 1920s, ran a mercantile from it through Prohibition, and turned it into a tavern when the law changed in 1933. It has barely been touched since. The Dutch Lunch, a plate of cold cuts, cheese, tomato, and onion meant to be assembled on white bread at the table, is still served exactly the way Gus did it.
DiSanti Farms. 31320 East Highway 50. The DiSanti family have been farming and selling produce in the Pueblo area for generations, a small example of the agricultural side of the Italian community. Many Bessemer households kept gardens stretching back to the old country. Some, like the DiSantis, scaled it into a working farm.
The CF&I steelworks itself. 1612 East Abriendo Avenue. Now operated as the EVRAZ Rocky Mountain Steel mill, the plant still rolls rail and rod on the same ground where Sicilian and Calabrian immigrants poured their first heats in the 1890s. The blast furnaces are gone but the mill is not.
Where They Came From
The Italian population of Bessemer was overwhelmingly southern. The largest single origin region was Sicily, and within Sicily the densest concentration came from the province of Trapani on the western coast, especially the town of Campobello di Mazara and the wine and olive country around Marsala. These were agricultural towns hit hard by phylloxera, by chronic land hunger, and by the collapse of Sicilian sulphur mining at the turn of the century.
After the Sicilians came significant numbers from Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot, and from Basilicata, the mountainous interior region between Calabria and Apulia. A smaller northern Italian presence existed, mostly from the Piedmont and Lombardy, but the Pueblo Italian community was decisively a southern Italian one in dialect, food, and devotion.
The same Trapani villages that built Bessemer sent siblings to New Orleans, Tampa, and Detroit. Pueblo was the western node of that Sicilian network.
Pueblo Today
Pueblo is now a Hispanic-majority city. The 2020 census put the Hispanic or Latino population at just under half the city total, and the south side that Italians once dominated is the heart of that community now. Roughly nine percent of Pueblo County still claims Italian ancestry, a smaller share than at the height but a meaningful one.
The visible markers of Italian Bessemer have thinned but not vanished. Mount Carmel still draws hundreds to the July feast. The Steelworks Center keeps the immigrant story in active circulation. A late-summer Italian festival in the Pueblo area brings out the third and fourth generations for sausage sandwiches and bocce.
The descendants are scattered. Many live in the newer subdivisions of north Pueblo and Pueblo West, others have settled an hour up Interstate 25 in Colorado Springs, and a smaller number went to Denver. The mill is still there. The grandchildren are no longer in it. The story did not end. It moved one valley over.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in Pueblo, Colorado?
Italians settled in Pueblo because the Colorado Coal and Iron Company, later renamed Colorado Fuel and Iron, recruited southern European labour for its steel mill from the 1880s onwards. The mill paid cash wages, offered company housing in the Bessemer neighbourhood, and let earlier arrivals sponsor cousins and brothers back in Sicily. By 1910 it was the largest steel works west of the Mississippi and the largest private employer in Colorado.
Is Bessemer still Italian today?
No, not in the way it was. Bessemer is now part of a Hispanic-majority south side, although Italian institutions like Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church remain active. Most Italian-American descendants moved to north Pueblo, Pueblo West, and Colorado Springs over the last fifty years.
Where did the Italians in Pueblo come from?
The Pueblo Italian community was overwhelmingly southern Italian. The largest single contingent came from Sicily, especially the province of Trapani and the town of Campobello di Mazara. Calabria and Basilicata sent the next biggest groups.
When did Italians first arrive in Pueblo?
The first significant Italian arrivals in Pueblo came in the late 1880s and 1890s, recruited directly to work at the Colorado Coal and Iron steel mill. By 1910 Italians were among the largest ethnic groups in Pueblo, and by 1920 roughly one in five Coloradans claimed Italian ancestry.
What are the most famous Italian landmarks in Pueblo?
The mother church of Italian Pueblo is Our Lady of Mount Carmel at 421 Clark Street, established as a parish in 1920. The Steelworks Center of the West at 215 Canal Street holds the CF&I archive that documents Italian recruitment and labour. Gus’s Place at 1201 Elm Street, founded by Sicilian immigrant Gus Masciotra in the 1930s, is the surviving Italian-immigrant bar in Bessemer.
What happened to the Italian community in Pueblo?
The Italian community in Pueblo did not disappear so much as relocate. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act ended large-scale Italian immigration, and the decline of American steel from the 1970s onwards pushed Italian-American grandchildren out of the mill and into other careers. Most descendants now live in newer neighbourhoods north of the city, in Pueblo West, or in Colorado Springs, while the heritage stays anchored in Mount Carmel, the Steelworks Center, and a handful of family businesses.
If your family’s story passed through Bessemer, or through any of the southern Italian towns that fed the Pueblo steel mill, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a comune in Trapani to a frame house on Northern Avenue, to wherever you live now.