This Submersible Sat at the Bottom of a Colorado Lake for Forty Years

But this state had its own failed underwater voyage. 

A few decades before the Titanic sank in 1912, a skilled engineer from Central City named Rufus T. Owens built a submarine designed to help the U.S Navy defend the coastline when the country was at war with Spain, according to the Gilpin Historical Society.

Submarines have been around since the eighteenth century, but Owens, a “skillful engineer,” built the first “mountain sub,” according to the GHS. And he got the chance to test his design in 1898, when he took his submarine to Missouri Lake, just a few miles north of Central City and about 1,200 miles from the nearest ocean.

A few friends — including two doctors who’d invested in the submarine and two contractors who’d help build it — came along for the test of the vessel he’d named the Nautilus. Initially, Owens was going to crawl into the submarine and guide it to the bottom, but he worried that he might get stuck. So his companions urged him to sink the vessel by filling it with 1,500 pounds of rocks…but his design had left out any kind of steering device or propulsive system that would help it resurface.

Owens wound up leaving the submarine on the bottom, and his experiment remained largely a secret until the water level in the lake dropped and exposed the sub. Although he had already successfully designed water systems and mining buildings for both Central City and Black Hawk, Owens soon became known for his failure.

The lake’s waters rose again, however, and the Nautilus disappeared from memory…until 1944, when a Central City native who remembered seeing the vessel being built decided to search for it. After successfully finding the sub when the lake was iced over in January, Central City set aside a day to pull it out with a steel tripod and chain.

Businesses closed for the special day, and although schools did, too, the Central City High School Band played “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” as officials tried to hoist out the sub, according to the Denver Public Library.

More than 300 people watched the effort, which lasted over an hour. First, the rescuers cut a hole in the ice large enough to pull the submarine through. While the chain broke on the first attempt to pull out the sub, it held strong on the second, and the vessel reappeared 46 years after it had hit bottom. Owens was not around to see it resurface; he’d died in 1919.

The Nautilus was displayed in different museums before being purchased by the Gilpin Historical Society; it’s now on display at the Gilpin History Museum in Central City.

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Margaret Brown honored after her Titanic adventure.

Molly Brown House Museum

But while Owens’s experiment connects Colorado to the history of submersibles, the state has a much more obvious tie to the Titanic: Margaret Brown, a noted member of Denver society, but also an activist who later ran for public office, escaped the sinking ship, and urged fellow passengers in the lifeboat to keep up their spirits — earning the title “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” and inspiring the creation of the Molly Brown House Museum, the first save by Historic Denver more than fifty years ago.