Pueblo County Biographies

Pueblo County, Colorado
HON. STEPHEN WALLEY

Contributed by Karen Mitchell.

Mr. Walley was born September 5, 1837, near the city of Albany, Albany Co., N. Y., and worked on a farm and at the butcher's trade until he was nineteen, except a part of four winters when he was sent to school. Successful farming and speculation in stock, cattle and sheep, at home, occupied his time from his nineteenth year up to his twenty-eighth. Discontinuing farming and dealing in stock, in 1860, he learned masonry in Chicago, and either with the trowel in hand, or contracting to furnish material for buildings or to build them, he has worked at his trade ever since, all but two years of speculation in horses in Topeka, Kansas, and Denver and South Pueblo, Colorado, to which places he shipped many carloads of horses and realized a " margin" on them. On the Atchison, Topeka & Santa 176 Railroad, and the Kansas Pacific Railroad, he did masonry in 1868, 1869 and 1870. The breaking-up of his camp by Indians on the latter road terminated his railroading, and the fall of 1872 after his stock speculating in Topeka and Denver, witnessed his arrival in South Pueblo with two car-loads of American horses, and the exchanging of them for town property. Two years of work at his trade in South Pueblo, during dull times, resulted in his looking elsewhere for work, and the taking of a contract to build the Malta Smelter, at Malta, Lake County, and the burning by him of the first brick burnt in California Gulch. Returning to South Pueblo in December, he worked a year, and again went to Malta, and burned 40,000 bushels of coal for the Malta Smelting Company. South Pueblo was to be his home, and 1878 found him within its limits completing the Walley Block, a building 50x125 feet, occupied on the ground floor by a wholesale and retail grocery, above by room renters and the Masonic lodge, and which brings him in a monthly rent of several hundred dollars. Contracting to furnish stone from a valuable stone quarry he owns, brick from a brick-yard in which he manufactures a million bricks every month, and to build buildings of any dimension is now done by him on a scale which astonishes. He has on hand and will complete them this month, July, 1881, contracts to build four wholesale houses for H. L. Holden, the large new round-house for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, the Alexander & Beacham Block, Holden Brothers Bank Block, Moore & Carlile Opera House (nearly finished), a store for L. McLaughlin, the Masonic Temple and the Baptist Church on the mesa; and residences each for Rev. Mr. Tompkins, Daniel Kellen and J. N. Kline. He was a member of the South Pueblo Council in 1878-79, elected Mayor of the city April, 1880, and re-elected in 1881. History of the Arkansas Valley, Colorado O L Baskin & Co., Chicago, 1881

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