Silverton: The Mine That Kept Going After Everything Quit
Near Telluride, Colorado
Baker's Park, the high alpine basin where Silverton sits, was reached by prospectors in the early eighteen seventies. The terrain was difficult enough that the first miners packed in on horseback over the mountains, before any road existed, carrying supplies for one season and hoping to come out with enough silver to justify the effort. Most did not.
The town of Silverton was platted in eighteen seventy-four, and the Denver and Rio Grande Railway reached it in eighteen eighty-two. What followed the railroad's arrival was a mining boom conducted at altitude and not slowing down: by the peak years between nineteen hundred and nineteen twelve, the surrounding district had produced more than two million troy ounces of gold and over fifty-one million ounces of silver, plus copper, lead, and zinc in quantities that would have been remarkable for any single district in the country.
Greene Street is still what it looked like when the money was moving through. The brick commercial buildings date to the eighteen eighties and nineties, intact because the economics of replacement never arrived. Silver crashed in eighteen ninety-three. Gold carried the district a while longer. Mining continued on reduced terms, through booms and contractions, until the last operating mine closed in nineteen ninety-two. At no point during that century-long arc was there enough new prosperity to tear down the old buildings and replace them with something modern.
The National Historic Landmark designation came in nineteen sixty-one, when the town's preservation was less a deliberate policy than an economic fact. Silverton was listed because what it had survived was intact: the Victorian-era commercial district, the residential blocks, the county courthouse, the old jail. The designation formalized what the silver crash had accidentally preserved.
Today Silverton has roughly six hundred residents, the smallest county seat population in Colorado. It is the only incorporated town in San Juan County. The morning train from Durango arrives in summer and disgorges more passengers than the town sometimes sees in a week. The economics of heritage travel are different from the economics of silver, but the infrastructure is the same, and the mountains that made the silver necessary are still directly overhead.
