Ghosts of Industry: Leadville, Colorado

Leadville is a classic mining boom-and-bust town. At more than 10,000 feet in altitude, it's perched on the side of a broad valley and that's rimmed with breathtaking peaks. The town has a tremendous amount of 19th century charm--with its stately brick commercial buildings and Victorian houses. Yet the land all around still bears the scars of the mining boom, which lasted from the 1880s through the early 20th century. You see yellow and black gashes on the hillsides and vast fields of stones with nothing growing on them. Poisoned earth. Some of the old mining buildings and infrastructure remains, but most has returned to dust. The entire town is an EPA Superfund site.

Leadville has special meaning for me because one of my great-grandfathers, John Kee MacGowan, who had grown up a poor, orphaned immigrant boy in Philadelphia, somehow hooked up with the Guggenheim family in Colorado in the late 1890s, got hired, and ultimately became the first non-family partner of Guggenheims Bros., which was at the time the largest mining empire in the world.

My ancestor walked these streets...

As far as I can make out, there are no mines currently operating in Leadville. Once there were dozens. The last mine to close was owned by ASARCO, the American Smelting and Refining Co., which my great-grandfather worked for for more than 25 years. Here's his 20-year medal from the Utah Copper Company, a subsidiary of ASARCO

The people of Leadville put a lot of effort into economic revitalization. There's a mining museum there (entirely from management's point of view; no mention of the UMW much less the Wobblies), a bicycle race, good restaurants, etc. Here's main street:

Here's the Tabor Opera House, established by one of the silver Kings, H.A.W. Tabor, who ultimately went bust:

Here's the stage backdrop, with a fanciful depiction of what Tabor hoped would be the Colorado capitol building. He hoped Leadville would become the state capitol.

Now we move onto some of the mining ruins on the outskirts of town. Some of these were Guggenheim mines.

Speaking of ghosts, there's an official ghost in Leadville--that of one-time State Senator Joseph Gallagher. He took a job in one of the most dangerous mines in Leadville, Moyer Mine, and died within two weeks in a mining accident. Blown up by a stick of dynamite!

Here's the house that Benjamin Guggenheim lived in. One of my grandmother's earliest memories was of traveling to Alaska by boat with her family and being met on the dock by a man in a huge bearskin coat--who turned out to be Ben Guggenheim. He later died on the Titanic.

The historic graveyard in Leadville is indeed an eerie place. Many of the oldest grave markers were made of wood, and they're in varying states of decrepitude. Some graves are ringed by metal fences. Others seem to have been restored and updated with new marble gravestones. There is no rhyme nor reason as far as I can tell. The entire graveyard has been overtaken by forest.