Mathias (Matija) SKALA

                   Came to America in 1891.  Name probably changed from Scala to Skala to Skalla.

Globeville, the working-class town that sprang up around the huge Globe Smelting and Refining Company. Globeville was platted in 1889, incorporated as a town in 1891, and annexed to Denver in 1902. It is bounded by 52nd Avenue on the north, the South Platte River on the east and south, and interstate highway 25 on the west. By 1900, roughly twenty-five Polish families lived in this industrial neighborhood that also attracted Scandinavians, Germans, and Austrians, as well as Slovenians, Croatians, Russians, and other Slavic peoples.

In Globeville's smelters, workers earned $2.50 for a ten-hour day of hot, dangerous, physically demanding labor separating gold, silver, and other valuable metals from Rocky Mountain ores. Families struggled to make ends meet by surrounding their shanties with pig pens, chicken coops, rabbit hutches, and vegetable patches. In spring, summer, and fall, many family members migrated to northeastern Colorado to plant, cultivate, and harvest sugar beets. Daughters worked in the Lindquist Cracker Company at 3520-3530 Walnut Street; sons sought work in the Globe and Grant smelters or at the Denver Union Stockyards across the South Platte River in the Swansea neighborhood.