Leadville and the Silver Boom

Leadville sits at ten thousand one hundred fifty-two feet above sea level in the central Rockies, making it the highest incorporated city in the United States. The altitude is striking, but what put it on the map was silver. Gold had drawn the first prospectors in the eighteen sixties, but the heavy black sand clogging their sluice boxes turned out to be rich in lead carbonate and silver.

When Leadville was formally incorporated in eighteen seventy-eight, a few hundred people lived there. By eighteen eighty the population had reached more than fifteen thousand, second only to Denver in the state. The mines poured out enormous wealth, and the city built opera houses, hotels, and gas-lit streets to match.

Among those who made fortunes there were Horace Tabor and a young woman named Margaret Tobin, who would later marry James Brown and become known the world over as Molly Brown. The boom ended hard. When Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in eighteen ninety-three, silver prices collapsed almost overnight and about ninety percent of mining jobs vanished.

The town shrank but survived. Much of its boomtown architecture still stands along Harrison Avenue today, a remarkably intact record of the years when silver, not gold, was the defining mineral of Colorado.