Lulu City: Colorado's Forgotten Silver Boom
Near Grand Lake, Colorado
High in the Colorado River headwaters, near what is now Rocky Mountain National Park, a silver rush town named Lulu City appeared in eighteen eighty after a silver find in eighteen seventy-nine and was abandoned by eighteen eighty-five. Promoter Benjamin Franklin Burnett laid out streets, named the settlement after his daughter Lulu, and attracted hundreds of miners convinced the mountains held fortunes in silver and lead. At its peak the town had saloons, a hotel, a post office, and optimistic talk of a railroad connection.
The ore proved too low-grade to profitably extract, and within five years nearly everyone left. Today only a handful of log-cabin ruins remain, accessible by a trail from the Colorado River trailhead. The site lies within Rocky Mountain National Park, preserved not as a success story but as a reminder of how quickly the promise of a mineral strike could gather and scatter an entire community.
