Review by Ed Quillen
History – July 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
Ghost Towns, Colorado Style Volume Three – Southern Region
by Kenneth Jessen
Published in 2001 by J.V. Publications
ISBN 0-9611662-4-X
WHEN PATRICIA NELSON LIMERICK looked at the development of the American West and wrote a book, she called it a Legacy of Conquest.
That’s certainly true, but there’s another valid approach: one that might well be called Legacy of Failure, represented by the hundreds of now-deserted places that once boasted saloons, hardware stores, post offices, literary clubs, fraternal lodges, and the other elements of community life.
These failures are a legacy that we cherish, as evidenced by this book and its two companion volumes for the north and central regions of the Colorado mountains.
As author Kenneth Jessen makes clear, the ghost towns of southern Colorado (south of U.S. 50 and west of I-25) are a diverse lot. We have our share, and perhaps more, of the typical gold- and silver-mining camps that faded when the veins pinched out or when metal prices dropped to unprofitable levels.
But we also have an abundance of one-time coal towns in Frémont, Heurfano, and Las Animas counties. We have dead factory towns and abandoned quarry towns. We have defunct railroad towns where the tracks were pulled up decades ago, industry towns where the factory closed after World War II, and farming towns — colonized by Germans, Hispanics, Mormons — whose crops failed to support the communities.
In other words, if you can think of a way for a settlement to sprout and then wither, it probably happened somewhere in southern Colorado, and Jessen has made an admirable effort to document the sites and the lore.
Like its companion books, Volume 3 is organized by regions (Frémont and Custer counties, San Luis Valley, etc.), with a brief historical introduction to each region, accompanied by a map. Then it lists the towns in alphabetical order, with photos and maps as appropriate. Each town (or cluster of nearby settlements) gets a page or two of brief history and condition, followed by a praiseworthy list of references for each town.
Jessen writes clearly, and thus clears up the confusion that resulted when, for instance, a post office with one name was moved to a settlement with another name, or an entire town up and moved to be closer to the railroad.
Over the years, legend creeps into history, and Jessen handles this well with some frank labeling, as with “Music City: Did It Really Exist?” followed by some pro and con reasons. He avoids the legend that Alferd Packer was convicted of cannibalism (which has never been a crime in Colorado) and he debunks the tale about Judge Geary calling Packer “a man-eatin’ son-of-a-bitch” at sentencing time.
The only sites he seems to have missed are a couple of places that aren’t exactly ghost towns, but could provide some context for nearby places that have been abandoned. He includes some such survivors, like Starkville and Crestone, but omits others, like Gardner and San Luis. Otherwise, I couldn’t think of any towns that should be in the book but aren’t, and he offers a host of places new to me.
One was Bismark, southeast of Mineral Hot Springs on County Road DD-2, and here’s what he has to say about it:
BISMARK
Named for the Prussian Chancellor
Saguache County, San Luis Creek drainage
Site not accessible, private property
Town had a post office, no remaining structures
Bismark was composed of a cluster of ranch buildings and was never a town as such. It may have had a school, however. Its post office opened in 1872 and closed seven years later. The place was named after Prince Otto Eduard von Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor, but with a simplified spelling. Bismark’s postmaster, Martin Rominger, ran a dairy. His butter was packed into twenty-pound kegs made of aspen. The butter was shipped to various mining camps in the area. Rominger’s supply room became a store when others, who lived in the area, needed supplies.
MOST GHOST TOWNS get more than that, because more is known about them. Most also reflected the economy and transportation of the time. When there weren’t cars, miners had to live near the mine, and often company towns were built for them. The same holds for lumberjacks and sawyers. When limited to horse and wagon, farmers needed a town nearby with a railroad connection for shopping and shipping. And the railroads, with labor-intensive steam locomotives and mostly human power for track maintenance, populated those towns with their own employees.
Much has changed since then, so that we don’t need nearly as many towns as we did a century ago.
And some towns weren’t needed then, like Custer City, a 1902 development in the Wet Mountains. It boasted the First Colorado Mine, but Jessen notes that “No ore was ever shipped from this mine,” and that “To promote the sale of lots, J.W. Adsmond walked 42 miles from Custer City to Pueblo to claim that Pueblo was within walking distance.”
Jessen concludes that “Custer City was about the sale of lots … rather than the founding of a legitimate town.” And today there’s nothing left except part of the base of the statue of Gen. George Custer — it was a mountain real-estate development that never developed, thus providing a “Legacy of Hope” to go along with all those failures.
At any rate, this book is both thorough and quite readable. It covers a territory that extends from lonely and tragic coal-camp Ludlow on the edge of the Great Plains across the more-or-less agricultural Wet and San Luis valleys to the high mining camps of the San Juans on the edge of the Colorado Plateau.
Whether you treat this as a guidebook in the glovebox or as a reference on the home shelf, it’s a solid book that is also a pleasure to read.
— Ed Quillen