Charles L. Tutt, Sr.

Charles Leaming Tutt Sr. (14 February, 1864 – 21 January, 1909) and his descendants are famous in Colorado Springs. He became a wealthy man by the time he was forty years old.

He was born February 14, 1864 in Philadelphia, as a son of a respected doctor, Charles Pendleton Tutt, and Rebecca Leaming. His father died of typhus when he was only two years old. The Tutt family's roots stretch back to England, where one ancestor was once Lord Mayor of London and another was a member of General George Washington's staff during the American Civil War.

As a child, Tutt attended the Protestant Episcopal Academy, where he met Spencer Penrose, nicknamed "Speck", who would later become Colorado's best-known mining mogul. The two boys shared another trait: both of their fathers were physicians.

While Penrose went on to attend Harvard University, the death of Tutt's father forced him to quit school at an early age. Meanwhile, he earned some money as a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Somehow he landed in North Platte, Nebraska, and lost $500 in a business venture. Then he moved on to Black Forest, El Paso County, Colorado, where he bought a cattle ranch in 1884. In 1885, Tutt sold two cows to earn the return fare to Philadelphia, where he married Josephine Thayer on 29 December 1885, daughter of Martin Russell Thayer, a jurist who had served in President Abraham Lincoln's administration. They relocated to Colorado, and a year after moving to the Black Forest ranch, Josephine convinced her husband to sell out and move to Colorado Springs to start a real estate and insurance business. With Josephine Thayer he had four children, three of them died young. This son Charles L. Tutt Jr., born January 9, 1889, died November 1, 1961, was the only one who lived to adulthood.

The Tutt family lived at 611 North Weber Street, which by then, was a two-story gingerbread house with a combination barn and buggy shed in the rear. Tutt's one-room business office was at 14 East Pikes Peak Avenue, Colorado Springs. After opening a branch office in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1889, Tutt visited Cripple Creek, walked up "Poverty Gulch" and stake out a mining claim. Once the claim was staked, a prospector, who held half interest in the mine, sold his half interest to Tutt for $50. Tutt was now the owner of the "Cash on Delivery" mine, the C.O.D. mine, but had no money to develop it. Charles Tutt, together with C. Findley and A. Carlton, all big players in the future of the mining district at Cripple Creek, Colorado, set up the C.O.D. Gold Mining Company, incorporated on February 26, 1892, as a Colorado corporation. Later that year, geologist Richard Penrose, Spencer Penrose's brother, travelled through Colorado Springs, met with Tutt and asked him to write to Spencer and encourage him to relocate to Colorado Springs for its business opportunities.

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