Baby Doe Tabor was told by her dying husband, Horace, to hold on to Leadville’s Matchless Mine at all costs. She became a pauper, freezing to death in the building at the left rear, still heeding her husband’s advice.
GOLD FEVER! THIS IS WHERE THE COLORADO GOLD RUSH BEGAN, the “Pikes Peak or Bust” frenzy that brought a hundred thousand people to Colorado in 1859 alone. In January of that year, placer gold discoveries along Clear Creek gave rise to Idaho Springs, a delightful former mining town now located right along Interstate 70. Five months after the Clear Creek discovery, lode gold was found where Central City now stands. (Note: For the definition of mining terms like “placer” and “lode,” consult the glossary terms on pages 309–311.)
As prospectors poured into the area, late arrivals expanded the boundaries of the excitement, searching for the next big strike. Not long after the Central City bonanza, Clear Creek gold seekers found pay dirt upriver from Idaho Springs, and Georgetown and its sister community of Silver Plume were born.
Fairplay and Leadville were also founded in the early boom times, but their real prosperity came later, with gold dredging in Fairplay in the 1870s and with enormous silver strikes in Leadville in 1877. All of the sites in this chapter offer excellent historic buildings and a genuine “touching-place” with Colorado’s past, none more so than Fairplay’s South Park City, one of the finest pioneer museums in the American West.
Central City and its next-door neighbor, Black Hawk, have been rivals since 1859. Their history and geography are so interconnected that it is impossible to write about one without including the other.
The rivalry has intensified in the last few years. When limited-stakes gambling came to the two towns in 1991, Black Hawk received a disproportionate amount of the revenue, partially because Denverites arrived at Black Hawk first. Central City responded with an enormously expensive parkway designed to ignore Black Hawk’s existence (no mention of the town is made on any of the billboards along the way) and bring gamblers into Central City first. Has the gamble paid off? I followed about ten autos on the parkway, and not one stopped in Central City; they all continued down the road to its rival. That is hardly a scientific study. But for every dollar gambled in Central City in 2008, seven dollars were spent in Black Hawk. At this writing, many buildings in Central City are vacant. Perhaps it will return to the near-ghost town status it experienced in the mid-twentieth century.
Black Hawk, for those interested in historic buildings, has paid a steep price for its gambling success. It still has some good buildings of antiquity, but they are harder and harder to find. Central City has kept its soul, but Black Hawk has not. A Denver cartoonist captured the feeling with a drawing of a string of glitzy casinos with the caption, “Did they have to kill Black Hawk to save it?”
In January 1859, placer gold discoveries were made along Clear Creek near what is now Idaho Springs, and on May 6 of that year, Georgian John H. Gregory staked a claim that established the first gold lode in Colorado. The excitement along Clear Creek turned into a mad rush in Gregory Gulch. Several thousand prospectors were at work in less than a month. Within two months, thirty thousand people were fueling the gold frenzy in what was called the Richest Square Mile on Earth.
The camp that formed was Gregory Diggings, later called Mountain City. A Gregory Diggings post office was established in January 1860, but the town was simply absorbed by Central City, its neighbor to the west. Central City was likely named because it was central among area mining camps. Black Hawk was a secondary part of the gold rush. Located down the gulch from Gregory Diggings, it was probably named because a mill erected there came from the Black Hawk Company of Rock Island, Illinois. While water was scarce to its upper-gulch neighbors, Black Hawk had an abundant supply, as it was located along the North Branch of Clear Creek. Because it had the enormous quantities of water necessary to power several mills, Black Hawk became known as the City of Mills.
When early surface gold and easily retrieved primary deposits along Gregory Gulch were depleted, miners found that the remaining hard-rock veins contained complex sulfide ores. The initial mining boom was over.
In 1867, however, Nathaniel Hill, a Brown University professor, put his theories of extracting gold from sulfide ore into practice by erecting in Black Hawk the first successful smelter in the territory, the Boston and Colorado Smelting Works. This solidified Black Hawk’s importance in a rebounding mining industry. Ore could now be shipped in concentrate, significantly lowering transportation costs.
The result was another boost in the economies of both cities. Black Hawk was relegated, however, to blue-collar status, while Central City became the grand lady of the Rockies, with a luxury hotel and an opulent opera house. While Black Hawk could claim Colorado’s first permanent school, Central City residents could sneer that although theirs was second, it was made of stone, not merely a wood frame.
The best ore bodies near Central City were depleted by the 1880s; from then until the early 1900s, area mines were steady producers, but the bonanza times were over. Mining continued as shafts went deeper, but inflation and the unchanging price of gold made mining less profitable. Before and after World War I, buildings in both towns were dismantled and moved to other communities. Although mining continued on a lesser scale, Central City and Black Hawk seemed headed toward obscurity.
Tourism brought the area somewhat back to life beginning in the 1950s, when I first gaped at the towns as a wide-eyed eleven-year-old. They were then dying, but not dead, as curious visitors glimpsed a past that was colorful but, for the townspeople, not particularly profitable.
When casino gambling came to Central City and Black Hawk, the stakes literally changed, for better or worse. Today the Richest Square Mile on Earth doesn’t try to remove pockets of gold from the hills; it tries to remove the gold from your pockets. Central City is the star for the ghost town enthusiast, where you can find, well, a jackpot of history.
Casinos occupy several of the historic buildings, many dating from 1874, of Central City’s Main Street. This photo was taken before the casinos opened and the shuttle buses arrived, bringing hopeful gamblers.
WALKING AND DRIVING AROUND CENTRAL CITY
A good place to begin your tour of Central City is the Schoolhouse Museum (open daily during the summer), which is located on High Street, one block north of the highway, where you will find displays and memorabilia provided by the Gilpin County Historical Society. Downtown Central City features many buildings from the gold rush days. Two structures of particular interest are the Teller House and the Central City Opera House, both located on Eureka Street. Summer tours of the buildings begin on the hour at the Teller House. The Teller House, built in 1872, was considered one of the West’s finest hotels. When President Ulysses S. Grant visited in 1873, silver bricks worth sixteen thousand dollars were placed so he would have a path appropriate for a president as he walked from his carriage to the Teller House. Because gold made Central City famous, he is supposed to have inquired why they had chosen silver. The answer? Gold was too common.
The 750-seat opera house was constructed in 1878 by Cornish stonemasons and features a central chandelier, hickory chairs, and decorative murals. Known for its excellent acoustics, it is still in use.
Beyond the opera house at 209 Eureka Street is the 1874 Thomas-Billings House, which was a wedding present in the early 1890s to Marcia Billings and her husband, Ben Thomas, from her parents. The furnishings are virtually complete, with more than four thousand items belonging to the Thomases. (The home is open for tours on weekends in the summer.)
This marker was erected in the City of Central Cemetery for siblings who died in 1872 and 1875, respectively. Their stone reads: “Sleep on, sweet babes and take thy rest / For such as thee the Savior blessed.”
Eureka Street continues northwest for a mile from Central City to six of its seven cemeteries. The cemeteries fan out around a triangle intersection of roads. Starting across from the Boodle Mill, the graveyard farthest to the northwest is the International Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) cemetery. One headstone there consists of an unusual log cabin for William R. Walter, who died in 1899 at twenty-one years of age. Another marker is for Sarah Stevens. She was born in 1796, the earliest birth date I can recall on a Colorado headstone. She died in 1872.
East of the IOOF graveyard is a small cemetery for the Red Man Lodge. Behind it is the large Catholic cemetery, where many natives of Italy, Ireland, and Germany are buried. The most interesting feature here is a double-thick brick beehive ovenlike structure. According to local author-historian Alan Granruth, its purpose is a mystery. He thinks perhaps it served as a temporary burial location during winter months when digging a grave in the frozen ground would have been difficult. It is also conceivable that it simply predates the cemetery and was a kiln used to convert wood to charcoal. (For more on that process, see the Piedmont, Wyoming, entry, pages 136–139.)
The Knights of Pythias cemetery is across the road to the east. Adjacent to it is the City of Central Cemetery. Most of the older graves are found in the southeast corner. Beyond that cemetery is a small graveyard for the Ancient Order of the Foresters.
Central City’s Masonic cemetery is on the other side of town. At the beginning of the Central City Parkway is a turnoff to the small ghost town of Nevadaville. Just before you reach a curious stone structure on your left (which may have been a Buddhist temple), you will see a road to your right, which leads to the cemetery. There I found something quite touching that I have not seen before: Thomas and Elizabeth Warren buried their daughter Minnie in 1876 after fourteen months of life. They named their next daughter Minnie as well, and she died in 1877 at only eight months of age.
WHEN YOU GO
From Denver, take Interstate 70 west for about 30 miles to Exit 243 and follow the Central City Parkway for 8.1 miles to Central City.