One day in 1970, Giuseppe Incitti took a pencil to paper and grieved the loss of his southern Colorado home.

“Consider the town of Sopris finished,” he wrote, translated from his native Italian. “It will be buried under water.”

The dam would rise, Trinidad Lake would fill, and Sopris would be but a memory.

The Purgatoire River needed to be tamed, its name derived from a Spanish legend about souls lost in purgatory. Now what of the souls of Sopris?

Read an article at the time of Incitti’s lament: “By 1975 one hundred feet of water will cover the place where four generations of Italian-American coal miners have lived and labored and loved.”

Now what? Incitti wondered that day with friends and family. It was a day of worship, wine and fond farewells. Of waving goodbye to a landmark hill.

Incetti continued on the page: “In order to remember we will leave upon that little mountain these three letters that you see: L.H.S.”

The hilltop letters for Lincoln High School remained — spelled by rocks painted white by students as part of one Sopris tradition. Many more traditions lasted for nearly a century, starting with the town’s beginnings in the 1880s.

In his mind’s eye, Domenic Incitti can still see those LHS rocks, looming just out the door of his childhood home. The 92-year-old son of Giuseppe can taste the man’s homemade zinfandel, can smell his mom’s bread baking in the backyard oven. He can hear the band playing in the dance hall.

The dirt streets run like the river, past the stores for soda and candy, past the homes and gardens of everyone he knew, past the school and church, on up to that rock-adorned hill where kids gathered.

“We had it good,” Incitti says here in his Colorado Springs home.

It will be the shared memory of a reunion scheduled for this summer. Incitti hopes to be there with others who grew up in Sopris — those kids now in their twilight, gathered around the shores of Trinidad Lake.

“They were every 10 years,” Incitti says of the reunions. “Then they figured we better have them every five years or so, because we’re losing so many people.”

A fellow child of Sopris, Genevieve Faoro-Johannsen, has helped organize. People have come from afar, flying in as she has from her home in Washington state. Or they’ve come from not so far away, from homes that families made elsewhere in southern Colorado after the government’s order to leave Sopris.

“And the people who can’t come send their deepest regrets,” Faoro-Johannsen says.

Sopris stirs deep emotions. Long after his town was submerged, Marco Terry met a Trinidad priest who knelt in reverence at the name.

“When he said the name Sopris, he needed to stop and genuflect,” Terry says, “because he knew people from Sopris thought it was a holy place.”

Faoro-Johannsen recalled 250-plus people at the last reunion. It was a mix of people with memories and the next generation who never saw Sopris, children and grandchildren.

“We just want them to understand our childhoods and why we love this place so much,” Faoro-Johannsen says. “We don’t want to be forgotten.”

A town rises

Incitti keeps things to remember.

In a corner of his home is a coal stove, not unlike those that heated the small, adobe homes of Sopris. He walks upstairs to a green, idyllic image of his father’s Italian village. In 1913, Giuseppe left for America at the age of 18.

The man is seen in a picture down the hall, him and other coal miners from the old country. Next to the frame is a long, heavy and rusted pick.

“He dug a lot of coal with this darn pick,” Incitti says.

As did thousands of miners for decades before and after the turn of the 19th century.

Faoro-Johannsen’s book, “Lost Sopris,” pinpoints 1873, when Elbridge B. Sopris reportedly discovered Las Animas County’s mineral wealth. He was the son of Richard Sopris, the Denver mayor who spread his influence across Colorado. The younger Sopris spread his around Trinidad; he is thought to have owned large swaths of the coal fields sprawling southwest of town.

The land would come under the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. The company’s top man, John D. Rockefeller, wasted little time.

Up went small houses for a wave of immigrants and up went much more. A directory in 1888 shows three general stores, four saloons, a lumber yard, a furniture store, a butcher, baker and barber. The population was marked at 1,700 in 1910, a few years before Faoro-Johannsen’s grandfather arrived to raise a family.

Like almost all families in Sopris, life would revolve around the Catholic church and school. And, of course, the mines.

“That highly sought black gold from a gaping, belching hole in southern Colorado would remain king for some time to come,” reads an older book, “The People of Sopris,” by Bob Leonetti.

Among the generation that grew up in Sopris and saw it submerged, Leonetti wanted his book to capture “the despairs and delights, the toughness and the tenderness, and the grit and the gumption that the People of Sopris will forever be remembered by.”

There was sweetness, yes — sweet as the soda fountain in the store of Marco Terry’s grandparents. He remembers his grandparents’ hot chocolate, the Bateros’ popcorn balls, the Cirames’ candied apples. He remembers Mrs. Donachy always giving him a quarter, a generous gift for more sweets.

Between the nostalgia, Terry remembers tension.

Sopris was a place of “underdogs,” he says — like miners of his family who led union efforts.

“There was just a lot of poor treatment of the immigrants,” Terry says, “until they fought.”

Light in darkness

Fighting in the region came to a boiling point in 1914, when federal militia and men hired by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. descended upon miners and families striking north of Trinidad, in Ludlow. More than 20 were killed, most of them women and children.

Rockefeller visited Sopris in 1915 as a show of goodwill. He called for better homes to be built, along with a community center and gym. It would be the place for sporting events and dance nights for years to come.

There would be more years of tragedy. In 1922, a nearby mine explosion killed 17 people.

Death and injury always lurked, Mary Lou Sebben recalls. She grew up in Sopris through the 1940s and ’50s.

“I know my dad had a very hard time with it,” she says from her Colorado Springs home. “You’d go underground, and sometimes some miners didn’t make it back out.”

They would leave at dark, before the sun rose. They would work long hours in the dark, and often they would return home in the dark. All for the possibility of $3 a day, Leonetti wrote in his book.

He quoted Ben Casias: “We worked on our hands and knees all day. … There was no ventilation, and we couldn’t stand up because the ceiling was so low. We used to chew tobacco to keep the dust out of our mouth.”

Strikes continued. Lines were drawn. Sebben’s father-in-law was a union leader, while her father declined joining, worried as he was about losing work.

“They would kind of get in some arguments,” Sebben remembers. “It led to them not being able to be close friends for a while. It was hard.”

From Terry’s view, the people of Sopris were part of a larger struggle for the labor rights of today — “the backbone of our country,” he says.

He similarly knew how that struggle threatened to divide friends and families. “There were conflicts,” he says. “But there was also a lot of love.”

Neverland’s numbered days

There was always Mass at the end of the week, usually followed by picnics and baseball games. Baseball was close to another religion or profession.

“How well you could swing a bat became as important as how well you could swing a pick,” Faoro-Johannsen wrote in her book.

Baseball was a needed distraction as mining operations shifted over the years. The Great Depression was followed by a world war that took men away from Sopris.

Others commuted to mines while others found work in the local school system, which became a main employer in town. The population of maybe a couple of thousand at one time became a few hundred.

“Times were tough, but those who remained were tough too,” Leonetti wrote in “The People of Sopris.”

They were generous people. They shared bread from their backyard ovens, wine from their cellars, fruits from their trees and vegetables from their gardens. “The Sopris grocery stores stayed almost broke feeding their own,” reads an old account by Nancy Wood.

As families expanded, so did the little houses. A man was hardly alone building another room.

“The kids traded baseball cards, the women traded patterns, and the men traded woodworking skills,” Faoro-Johannsen says.

Men taught their boys as they went. Men such as Giuseppe Incitti, who instructed his sons in another way.

“My dad always said, ‘You guys gotta do something else. Don’t go in the mine,’” Dominic Incitti remembers. “He didn’t want to see that for us.”

He wanted to see them get an education, as they did at Lincoln High School. The Incitti boys played sports, performed on stage and played in the band; students of small classes did it all. Among the activities, dances and concerts around town, it seems most were too busy to know of any trouble back home.

“I never realized we were poor,” Terry says.

That’s a common refrain among people who grew up in Sopris. Another: “We were one big happy family.”

To an extent, they literally were. Wrote Wood: “They married among themselves generation after generation, until so many of them shared the same family names that the church records read like a litany.”

Sebben chuckles at the thought. “We used to say, ‘We can’t talk about anybody, because we might be related.’”

Several spouses started as friends, just kids by the river. The river “was their Neverland,” Faoro-Johannsen wrote in her book.

It was the river that put Sopris on the map, she noted: “A river that ultimately proved to be both a blessing and the reason the dot on the map disappeared.”

Gone but not forgotten

The Purgatoire had wreaked havoc for decades, flooding Trinidad and washing away homes, businesses and lives. In 1955, another flood proved deadly. A teenager was lost.

Finally, the government wheels started turning. A dam-creating bill reached Dwight D. Eisenhower’s desk in 1958.

Faoro-Johannsen was born a couple of years before. “My whole life was, ‘The dam is coming, the dam is coming,’” she says. “It was just a matter of time.”

Many stayed for as long as they could, including Incitti’s dad. He thinks of the man often, thinks of him every time he walks up the stairs of his Colorado Springs home and sees that green, idyllic image of Giuseppe’s Italian village.

Why would he leave? Incitti has wondered.

“Why would an 18-year-old kid leave a beautiful place like this to go to a foreign country where you don’t know the language, you’re going to be discriminated against, and you don’t know what kind of job you can get?”

Incitti asked his dad. The answer was simple: Opportunity. And as to why he stayed in Sopris, the answer was also simple.

“It wasn’t as hard as you would think,” Incitti says, “because everybody in that little community was also from Italy.”

Sopris was simply home. Until it wasn’t.

“We will leave all the roses to rest beneath the water,” Giuseppe wrote that day in 1970, taking a final look at that hill of rocks spelling LHS.

That day of goodbye started with Mass. A priest read from Ecclesiastes. “To every thing there is a season …”

Some families salvaged what they could from their homes. In the basement of Sebben’s Colorado Springs home today is paneling from the old house.

“It was practical, but I guess mostly you would say it was sentimental,” Sebben says. “They wanted to have something to remind them of the life they had.”

It was a “simple life,” Crist Cunico wrote later in 1981. “I’ve seen a lot over the last thirty years, but for dear old Sopris I still shed tears,” he wrote.

His poem went on: “What saddens me most from this whole ordeal is to know that when we’re gone it will not have been for real.”

The people of Sopris are not gone yet. They’ll be together again for the reunion this summer.

“It’s one thing our parents inspired in us: Friends are friends for life,” Faoro-Johannsen says. “Friends until the very end.”

That will be them on the shores of the reservoir. The water has covered everything they once knew, everything but the hills of pinyon and juniper rolling beyond.

And they’ll know exactly where to look, however faint and overgrown now: those rocks on the hill spelling LHS.