Review by Ed Quillen
Ghost Towns – August 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ghost Towns, Colorado Style – Volume Two, Central Region
by Kenneth Jessen
Published in 1999 by J.V. Publications
ISBN 0-9611662-9-0
COLORADO’S NOTORIOUS “boom-and-bust” economy may be best symbolized by the hundreds of ghost towns that dot our mountains and prairies. A wide spot may have housed a thousand people in 1880, along with post office, grocers, saloons, smelter, livery stables, stage station and the like; by 1885, when the local veins pinched out, it was abandoned to the elements. After a few decades, this piece of our history can be found only with a guidebook.
Thus at intervals of a decade or more, we see a new comprehensive book about Colorado’s ghost towns. The classic, Muriel Sibell Wolle’s Stampede to Timberline, appeared in 1949, illustrated with her drawings that evoked both adventure and decay. Then came Perry Eberhart’s Guide to the Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps in 1959 which was replete with maps and lists of the tiniest of temporary settlements — so the reader could go out searching for the sites of those long gone places. Robert L. Brown’s Colorado Ghost Towns in 1972, was amply illustrated with photographs, some of the “then and now” variety.
Now we have the second installment of Kenneth Jessen’s three-volume series, Ghost Towns, Colorado Style. This book covers the central mountain region between Interstate 70 and U.S. 50 — the northern volume appeared last year, and the southern is due next year.
The book is generally organized by counties (Pitkin, Eagle, and Garfield are combined), with the towns listed more or less alphabetically in each county — Lake, Chaffee, Park, Gunnison, and Teller.
At the beginning of each county chapter, there’s a general history of the area along with profiles of prominent people of the past — for instance, an excellent account of Mart Duggan, the hard-handed town marshal who brought some degree of order to Leadville during the wildest days of its 1879 boom.
As Kenneth Jessen points out in his introduction, it can be difficult to define a town. It’s easy if the place had a post office, a transportation terminal (stage station or railroad depot) and a municipal government, but there were many places which lacked one or more of these attributes, and to add to the confusion, the post office might have had a different name than the railroad siding.
It’s also difficult to define a ghost town — Leadville is hardly a ghost town, but it’s been through the boom and bust cycle several times, and the story of mining in Colorado cannot be told without copious mentions of Leadville.
Sorting all this out more than a century later can be quite a challenge, and in general, Jessen meets this challenge well.
Each town’s entry starts with a brief announcement of its general location and accessibility, along with its postal status and historic remnants. Then comes a page or more of history, usually with lively anecdotes and clear photographs, followed by a list of Jessen’s sources for those who want to learn more.
Here’s a sample:
Ball Town
— Lake County, Lake Creek drainage.
— Accessible via paved road; private property
— Town did not have a post office, several standing structures remain.
Ball Town was originally called Lake Creek Station by the Denver & Rio Grande. Trains stopped to let passengers off for the trip to Twin Lakes. A wooden sign suspended between two poles read “Twin Lakes” and originally marked the location.
William H. Ball and his wife worked a placer claim and lived near there. When travelers became stranded at the station, the Balls took them in as guests. Eventually, they constructed guest cabins, and Mrs. Ball served fresh trout dinners.
A hack provided service between the resort hotels at Twin lakes and Ball Town. A round trip cost $3, relatively high for a time when a day’s wages could be far less.
There are guest cabins at the site today, and the tradition established a century ago continues.
JESSEN’S WRITING is clear and straightforward, the index is excellent, and he’s generous with his gratitude to those who assisted his research, such as Salida’s Dick Dixon with his encyclopedic knowledge of the Turret area. And the book is well illustrated with useful maps, historic photos, current photos, and evocative drawings.
For those interested in visiting the towns, he offers useful advice, as with this for Sargents: “Private property limits exploration in Sargents, and vicious dogs make photography somewhat hazardous.”
I hesitate to point out omissions — in my review of the northern volume, I wrote that Teller City was missing, when in fact it got two pages — but I found it odd that Leadville and Buena Vista were covered, while Salida wasn’t, and neither were spots like Poncha Springs, Shirley, Centerville, Mears Junction, Hartsel, Garo, and Kortz (Smeltertown).
They weren’t mining camps, but they were settlements that went through the booms and busts related to mining. Some thrive like Poncha, some subsist like Smeltertown, and others are known only to history buffs.
I would have liked to see these, but no book can cover everything, and this one had a lot of places I hadn’t heard of before — among them Beaver City up Clear Creek, Camp Jeffery and Minneapolis in the Turret area, Cosden on Tomichi Creek, and Evansville east of Leadville.
All in all, this is a fine piece of work — a clear and useful guide to the present that leads into a well-researched past.
— Ed Quillen
