Mary Miller, founder of the town of Lafayette, appears in an 1862 photograph with her husband, Lafayette, for whom she named the town. She platted 150 acres and sank the first coal mine shaft in 1887. A 1942 photograph shows nine miners standing near the tipple of a coal mine on the site of the Black Diamond Coal Mine, one of more than a dozen mines that were crucial to Lafayette's history as a typical mining town in Colorado.