Ironton: The Town That Silver Built and Buried
Near Telluride, Colorado
The town of Ironton sprang out of nothing in the spring of eighteen eighty-three, on a bench below Red Mountain Pass at nearly ten thousand feet. More than one hundred buildings went up in under three weeks, and by year's end over a thousand miners had settled in. It had started as Copper Glen, but the post office took the name Ironton and it stuck.
Ironton sat at the heart of the Red Mountain Mining District, the second-largest silver district in Colorado. At its peak census count in eighteen ninety, three hundred twenty-three people called it home year-round, though many more cycled through in summer. Then eighteen ninety-three arrived. When the federal government demonetized silver, the price collapsed nearly overnight. By the early nineteen hundreds the town was all but empty. One family held on until the nineteen sixties. Today only foundations and scattered debris mark the site along the highway you are driving now.
