Miss Colorado’s unique crown was handcrafted to represent the state

By Jenn Fields, Special to Mines Newsroom

When the current Miss Colorado crowns the next winner of the scholarship competition on July 14, Sarah Swift will be wearing a piece of Colorado history. 

The Miss Colorado crown is one of only three crowns across the Miss America program that was hand-crafted by jewelers, goldsmiths and lapidarists, making the 7.5 troy ounce, 14 karat gold crown, with its 613 hand-set jewels, a true crown jewel of the Mines Museum of Earth Science’s permanent collection, housed on the Colorado School of Mines campus in Golden. 

Colorado’s crown is a work of art that was created specifically to reflect the state’s topography, from peaks to plains, and its iconic natural beauty. Denver jeweler Leonard J. Molberg’s 1972 design includes snow-capped mountains, aspen leaves in the full multitude of fall hues, flowing rivers of sapphires and zircons, columbines carved from amethyst, rolling plains of gold and sparkling sheaves of wheat in citrine and topaz.

“The makers decided they didn’t want to just make something ordinary,” said Renata Lafler, executive director of the Mines Museum. “They wanted to embed symbols of Colorado into the crown itself.” 

The entire crown was crafted by hand. “This is not like mass-produced jewelry that is molded,” she added. “This was made piece by piece, and the gems were set by hand.”

Molberg (1923-2011) was a jeweler, the owner of Molberg’s Gold Palace in Denver and a Certified Gemologist Appraiser through the American Gem Society. During his career, he also served as the president of the Rocky Mountain Jewelers Association, and in 1972, he gathered its members to contribute to the project of hand-building a unique crown for the Miss Colorado Pageant Association (the program’s name in the 1970s) – on their own, without a commission – in time to crown the 1973 Miss Colorado. 

The association pitched in their own materials when they could, along with more than 400 hours of work. The crown has 22 names engraved inside the base section to honor the artists who created it, but some names (“Johnson Jewelry” and “Statler’s Leading Jewelers”) represent the work of a company of jewelers, so it’s likely that more than 22 people contributed time and materials. 

“They put the money up themselves to make this crown, so they tried to find as many materials they could find locally or had on hand,” Lafler said. 

To create the crown’s purple hand-carved columbine petals, one of the lapidarists bought a big Brazilian amethyst geode at a local rock shop in Denver called Missouri Minerals (other materials the team didn’t have on hand came from another local shop, Bill’s Rock and Hobby Company). 

“He came back with it and said, ‘OK, let’s pluck out the crystals and cut some petals,’ and that’s what they did,” Lafler said. “I love that story, because it shows you they were working with what they could get.” 

Once completed, the association insured the crown for $10,000 — that’s more than $70,000 in 2024 dollars.

The crown initially came to the Mines Museum in 2013 on loan. But when the RMJA disbanded in 2019, they gave it to the museum permanently. “They said, if you can secure it, insure it and display it, you can have it,” Lafler said.

Swift, Miss Colorado 2023, had been looking forward to wearing this special crown since she first learned about it in 2012. Only two other states, Pennsylvania and Nebraska, have hand-crafted crowns, but only Miss Pennsylvania and Miss Colorado get to wear their crowns—Nebraska’s permanently resides in a museum. Now, as Swift ends her time as Miss Colorado, she wants more people to know about this beautiful piece of Colorado history.

“I want to find people to help me honor and celebrate the history of the crown the same way I want to, because so many girls dream about this crown,” Swift said. “It’s such a piece of our history, and so many girls know it and look forward to seeing it every year.”

You can see the crown most days of the year in a vault on the ground floor of the Mines Museum. However, the crown does leave Mines twice a year: Once every summer for the crowning of the new Miss Colorado and once more when the new representative has her official photos taken wearing the crown. Miss Colorado is also allowed to wear the crown when she visits the Mines Museum.

Facts about the Miss Colorado Crown

• The crown has a total of 613 gemstones, including: diamond, amethyst, citrine, topaz, emerald, ruby, garnet, peridot, zircon, tourmaline and sapphire. It’s made of 7.5 troy ounces of yellow, white, red and green gold. 
• The Miss Colorado crown is a true crown—not a tiara. It forms a complete circle, and the mountains and rivers cascade down the sides to the back, while the plains roll all the way along the entire bottom of the crown. “What most people don’t get to see on our crown is that it goes completely around, with the detail, with the gemstones—it’s beautiful, it’s handcrafted the whole way around,” Lafler said.
• Each of the aspen leaves on the crown is slightly different from the next. The jewelers crafted carefully serrated edges on the leaves and studded them with “melee” gems—tiny gemstones—in a variety of colors to represent the fall color transition using tourmaline, peridot, citrine, garnet and ruby.
• Each purple columbine petal is made of hand-carved amethyst, and diamonds dot the pistils at the center. The flowers unite at leaves featuring three emeralds. 
• The crown is topped in peaks and rivers of sapphire and clear zircon, which cascade all the way down to the back of the crown.
• The jewelers added a feature to the Miss Colorado crown that’s rare today: sterling-silver hair combs to secure it on the winner’s head. All of the young women who head to Miss America – including Swift for nearly all of her public appearances – wear a mass-produced crown that has two elastic bands that cross at the center of the crown to make it easy to barrette it into place. 
• The first Miss Colorado to wear the crown, Rebecca Ann King (Miss Colorado 1973), went on to become Miss America in 1974. 
• When Lafler joined the Mines Museum in 2018, the crown had not been cleaned in some time, so she arranged to have it cleaned by a jeweler. The jeweler was shocked at the state of the crown at the time—decades of hairspray had dimmed its natural shine. He spent two weeks cleaning it. It’s now professionally cleaned every year or two.