Silverton: The Town That Held On
Near Telluride, Colorado
Silverton sits at ninety-three hundred feet in a flat-bottomed valley ringed by peaks pushing toward fourteen thousand. Miners moved in after the Brunot Agreement of eighteen seventy-three forced the Utes off the San Juan Mountains, and San Juan County was formally organized in eighteen seventy-six with Silverton as county seat.
The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-two, giving the mines a way to ship ore without pack mules. The district produced silver, gold, lead, copper, and zinc for decades, and Silverton rode the boom with saloons, newspapers, and a Congregational church. The eighteen ninety-three silver crash nearly killed it, but gold and base metals kept a handful of operations running into the twentieth century. The last major mine, the Sunnyside, closed in the early nineteen nineties. Today the town's Victorian storefronts survive largely intact, and the narrow-gauge railroad that arrives each morning from Durango carries tourists instead of ore.
