Along the front ranges of the Colorado Rockies, west of Denver, the land climbs so sharply that whole towns cling to the floor of a single winding canyon. Down that gorge tumbles Clear Creek, and along its walls stand the two towns that would anchor a Scottish family's life in America for some sixty years: Idaho Springs lower down, and Georgetown higher up. It was here, in this high country of thin air and long winters, that David B. Hill and Agnes S. Beveridge made their home — two Scots who had crossed the Atlantic separately and found each other in a silver-mining valley far from the cities of their birth.
Scottish Beginnings
The Hill family traces its earliest known roots to Colin Hill, born about 1810 in Dundee, Angus, Scotland. On 4 September 1836 he married Janet Niven. Colin lived until 1880, and it was from this Scottish family that the branch which crossed the Atlantic to Colorado descended.
Among the sons of this line was David B. Hill, born 22 July 1842 in Leslie, in the county of Fife. Fife in the mid-nineteenth century was a region of small linen and weaving towns, farmland, and — increasingly — coal, iron, and industry, a place that gave the world engineers and machinists trained to the rhythms of mill and works. Whatever schooling David received in Leslie, he emerged with the mechanical aptitude that would define his working life. His was a family of some standing and learning: his brother, the Reverend James Hill, born in 1845 in Markinch, Fife, entered the ministry in Scotland — a vocation that speaks to the household's respectability and to the seriousness with which the family regarded matters of faith and character.
David B. Hill, Pioneer Mining Man
In 1864, at the age of twenty-two, David Hill left Scotland for the United States. He settled first in New York City, where he lived for about eight years — formative years in a great and crowded metropolis in the aftermath of the Civil War. There, on 11 November 1869, he was raised to the Sublime Degree of a Master Mason in Pyramid Lodge No. 490, A.F. & A.M., becoming an honorary life member. Freemasonry offered a network of fellowship and mutual support that followed a man wherever his work took him, and for a Scottish immigrant making his way in America it was both a moral anchor and a practical community — a bond that would follow David to the end of his life and shape his funeral.
By 1872 David had moved west to Georgetown, in Clear Creek County, and by 1874 he was firmly settled in Colorado. The state in the 1870s was in the grip of a silver and gold boom, and Clear Creek County, with its steep gulches and roaring mills, was among the richest mining districts in the Rocky Mountains. A man with David's training was precisely what these operations required — someone who could keep the stamp mills running, the machinery sound, and the ore moving. He built a reputation as one of the ablest men in his line, a master engineer and machinist respected across Clear Creek, San Juan, and San Miguel counties.
The demands of his profession kept him often on the move. Between 1880 and 1910 he traveled on behalf of large mining companies as far afield as California and Canada; in 1900 he was recorded as a married boarder at Temescal, in Riverside County, California, lodging away from home while his skills were needed elsewhere. His most demanding post was at the Gold King mine in the San Juan country near Silverton, where he managed the mills. Life there was hard and isolated; through one long winter the only communication between the mine and the outside world was by snowshoe. Yet for all the satisfaction of his work, his heart always yearned for Idaho Springs, "where the sunbeams have their habitation and snowslides never menace," and where a host of friends held him close in their regard, counting his rare visits home as a treat.
The rare visits of his brother offered him equal comfort. On one occasion David returned home from Silverton to receive the Reverend James Hill, who had come from Scotland — the first the two brothers had seen of each other since David sailed for America. After their reunion James left to join his family, who were staying with relatives in Kansas, and David returned to Silverton.
Agnes Beveridge Hill, Singer and Author
The woman David married had come to the same distant mountains by a different road. Agnes S. Beveridge was born in Edinburgh, Midlothian, on 6 August 1845, and it was in that historic Scottish capital that she was educated. Edinburgh in these years was a city of learning and refinement, and Agnes plainly absorbed something of its literary and musical spirit — a love of the classics and of the best in literature that would remain with her all her life. Her horizons soon extended beyond Scotland: by 1862 she was in Berlin, where she studied music, and this German training would form the foundation of the singing career for which she later became known.
When Agnes was about twenty she left the Old World for America, arriving first at Chicago around 1864 and settling in the busy Illinois city that drew so many immigrants after the Civil War. In 1880 she came west to Denver, and it was in Arapahoe County that she married David B. Hill on 12 October 1881. From the time of her marriage forward, Agnes made her home in Clear Creek County — first at Georgetown, later at Idaho Springs, with a season at Silver Plume in 1893.
If the mining camps of Clear Creek were rough and remote, Agnes brought to them a rare cultivation. For nearly half a century she was among the most cultured figures of the county, widely recognized as its finest soprano, and she often sang in Denver, where she was well known. Each year she entertained the Caledonian Society with the Scotch ballads of her youth, and she took pupils, among them Miss Maggie Coughlin of Silver Plume. Her participation in the Eisteddfod concerts — the Welsh singing festival transplanted to the mining districts — placed her at the heart of the region's musical life. Her devotion to Scotland ran deep: invited to read Robert Burns to the senior-junior English class at the local school, she presented "To a Mouse," "Highland Mary," "Tam O'Shanter," and others so that listeners unfamiliar with the Scotch tongue came to understand them far better.
Agnes was also a writer of both prose and poetry. During the silver panic of 1893 — the season in which the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act collapsed the price of silver and threw Colorado's mining camps into crisis almost overnight — she published a novel, The Story of the Canyon, its plot set among the mining camps of Clear Creek County and peopled with characters drawn from people well known in that part of the country. The book was popular at the time of its publication. She belonged to the Shakespeare Club of Idaho Springs for more than thirty years and remained active in its welfare.
Her home was a center of gracious hospitality. In August 1921 she and her daughter Heather entertained a large gathering of friends at a formal tea, an afternoon of piano solos, songs, and readings — among them several Scotch readings that Agnes herself consented to give. She was also a woman of deep faith and long service in the Presbyterian church of Idaho Springs. Her pastor, who knew her through many years of church work, spoke of her spiritual insight, her great knowledge of the Scriptures, and her happy faculty of applying its precepts in her daily living. That faith runs through her own poem "The Last Inn," a meditation on death as a voyage guided by a trusted Pilot toward "that harbour of hope, where life ends and begins."
A Letter from Grandpa
Something of the warmth beneath David Hill's professional accomplishment survives in a single letter, written from Idaho Springs on the thirteenth of June to his young grandson Edward. In it the master engineer set aside his mills and machinery to spin a tall tale for a boy far away, and the whole texture of the family's world comes alive: the automobiles running around the mountain town, the picture shows, the passing entertainment of hearing Harry Lauder speak — "You thought it was grandpa that was speaking haha I don't have a voice like a crow" — and Edward's dog Laddie, whom the old man wished were there to join in the adventures.
He told of going fishing when the creek ran too high, of walking on to a small lake ringed with trees and rocks, and of pulling out "a dandy" of a trout only to have a beaver, "as black as coal" with "eyes like the stars," spring from the roots of a tree, seize the fish by the tail, and plunge back into the water, breaking his line. Walking home in the dust, he was knocked flat by a billy goat with a broken horn and lay still until it wandered off; then he scared a fox into dropping a chicken, which he petted back to life. At last he came upon a magpie perched on a boulder in the middle of the road, and rolling the rock aside found beneath it fifty cents and a postage stamp marked "In 1893." With the fifty cents he bought four small trout at the butcher shop, not wishing to come home empty-handed — but when a band came playing through the street and an automobile full of young girls carried Heather off to the music, the old folks left behind forgot the pan, and the trout went up in smoke.
"I must quit Edward," he closed, "you will be tired reading it." He noted that Grandma had gone to Denver on Thursday and would return the next day, and sent, with Heather, his dearest love to Edward and to the boy's papa and mama.
The Daughters
David and Agnes had two daughters, both born in Colorado and both raised in the cultured, musical world their parents made in Clear Creek County.
Muriel Beveridge Hill was born 8 January 1883 in Georgetown. Heather Margaret Hill was born 5 October 1888 in Colorado. On 14 March 1917 Heather married Kenneth Edward Moscript, and the couple made their home in Georgetown. It was to Heather's home that her aging parents came in their final months.
Last Years
In 1904, after four decades in America, David Hill was naturalized in Denver — a formal seal on a life long since planted in Colorado soil. About fifteen years before his death he suffered a stroke, and his health slowly failed. He and Agnes appear as heads of their own household in Idaho Springs in the 1910 and 1920 census records, but in September 1927 they left that home and went to live with Heather, Mrs. Kenneth E. Moscript, at Georgetown, where David received the best of attention.
David Hill died at his daughter's home on the night of Sunday, 4 March 1928, at the age of eighty-five. Funeral services were held in Idaho Springs the following Wednesday afternoon at the Masonic Temple, the Masons taking charge, with the Reverend H. S. Beavis of the Presbyterian church preaching the sermon. Remembered as the embodiment of honor, integrity, and kindliness, he was buried in the rugged ground of the hills that had been his home through so many active years.
Agnes did not long survive him. Grief over his death was believed in part responsible for her own decline. After a short illness she died at the home of Fred Stroehle on Colorado Street, at nine o'clock on the evening of Tuesday, 10 April 1928 — within six weeks of her husband, after forty-six years of life together. Her funeral was held on 13 April at the Presbyterian church in Idaho Springs. Though the day was stormy, the church was filled with friends who assembled from Idaho Springs, Georgetown, and Denver to pay their respects. The service included two of her favorite selections, "The Beautiful Isle of Somewhere" and "Nearer My God to Thee," along with the funeral marches of Beethoven and Chopin, and the account of her funeral closed with her own poem, "The Last Inn." She was buried beside David in the Idaho Springs cemetery, survived by her two daughters.
Heather long outlived both her parents and her sister, dying in November 1982 at Idaho Springs — the mountain town that had been the heart of her family's life for a century.