Georgetown: Silver Capital of the Rockies

Gold brought the first prospectors to Clear Creek Canyon in eighteen fifty-nine. Silver is why Georgetown survived.

The silver strikes in the Georgetown district began in earnest in eighteen sixty-four, and the ore proved to be extraordinarily rich. By the eighteen seventies, Georgetown and its neighbor up the canyon, Silver Plume, had become the most productive silver-mining district in Colorado, rivaling even Central City in output. At the peak in eighteen seventy-seven, roughly five thousand people lived in and around Georgetown. The town had two newspapers, a telegraph office, a bank, five churches, hotels, and an opera house. The Leavenworth Mine, the Burleigh Mine, the Lebanon, the Marshall, they pulled millions of dollars of silver from the surrounding mountains.

The wealth showed in the architecture. Georgetown's wealthy merchants and mine owners did not build rough frontier structures. They built Victorian houses, elaborate and well-made, attempting to reproduce the domestic standards of the more settled East. When the silver price collapsed in eighteen ninety-three following the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, Georgetown's economy crashed. The mines closed. The population fell.

But the buildings stayed. Because Georgetown did not boom again and did not get torn down and rebuilt, the Victorian streetscapes survived nearly intact. In nineteen sixty-six, Georgetown and Silver Plume together were designated a National Historic Landmark District, one of the largest and most intact nineteenth-century mining town complexes remaining in the American West. The district encompasses more than two hundred historic structures in the two towns, together with the reconstructed narrow-gauge railroad that connects them.

Driving through on the Interstate today, you can see the Victorian rooflines on the hillside. Behind them is a canyon that once held the richest silver district in the Rockies.