So my project is to recreate the town of Sopris, Colorado, currently at the bottom of Trinidad Lake online. The concept is one pioneered buy History Colorado (formerly known as the Colorado Historical Society) which has reorganized the entire state history museum this way, and the material comes a place called the Bessemer Historical Society, which holds the archives of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which owned Sopris, its accompanying coal mine and many other towns and mines in southern Colorado.

We have mine maps like this one (which doesn’t do justice to how cool this looks in person because it’s such a small scan):

We have access to pictures like this:

Access to physical artifacts from the community:

We will eventually have interviews with people who grew up in Sopris before the government flooded it 1973.

What I need to do over the next two weeks is to figure out the first steps to getting all of this up inside a conceptual framework that will make sense to the general public.  And, oh yeah, instructions for my students who will be doing this with me in a class that starts a week after I get back to Colorado.

Good times. Good times.

Source: Sopris, Colorado, currently underwater, recreated online.