Stringtown and the Leadville Smelters

This stretch just southwest of Leadville was once Stringtown, a thin ribbon of houses and ore mills strung along the road down California Gulch. It sat at the heart of one of the richest silver districts in the American West.

Leadville's boom began in eighteen sixty with gold placers in California Gulch. The gold played out, but in the eighteen seventies prospectors discovered that the heavy lead carbonate that had clogged their sluices was loaded with silver. Smelters sprang up to roast and refine the ore, and Leadville exploded into a celebrated silver city.

That legacy left a darker mark. More than a century of smelting scattered lead, arsenic, and cadmium across these soils. Today the whole eighteen square mile area is the California Gulch Superfund site, where the Environmental Protection Agency has spent decades cleaning up what the boom left behind.