The county encompasses about 150 square miles of mountainous
terrain that ranges in elevation from 6,960 feet to 13,294 feet. The county was
named for the first territorial governor, William Gilpin.
Gilpin County has a population of just under 6,000, with
most residents living in the unincorporated areas of the county. Its two
main cities are Central City (population 700), the county seat, and Black
Hawk (population 115). Together, these cities form the Central City and
Black Hawk National Historic District, renowned for its mining history. The
county also includes the small community of Rollinsville, as well as the ghost
towns of Nevadaville and Russell Gulch. State Highway 119 is the major
north-south thoroughfare, winding through the mountains from Rollinsville to
Black Hawk and continuing south to its junction with US Highway 6 in Clear
Creek Canyon. State Highway 46, also known as Golden Gate Canyon Road, proceeds
east from Highway 119 just north of Black Hawk and runs west from the Jefferson
County border. Highway 72, also known as Coal Creek Canyon, runs through the
very north of the county up to Wondervu.
Native Americans
Ute people occupied the Colorado Rocky Mountains as early as
the fifteenth century, reaching the central Rockies by about the seventeenth
century. The Utes lived a nomadic hunter-gatherer life, following game such as
deer, elk and buffalo into the high country during the summer and camping at
the base of the foothills during the winter. They gathered berries, nuts,
roots, and other dietary plants. After contact with early Spanish explorers to
the south, the Utes incorporated horses into their culture, which made hunting
and traveling easier. Utes lived in temporary or mobile dwellings such as
wickiups and tipis.
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, Arapaho and Cheyenne people migrated from the
upper Midwest onto Colorado’s Great Plains and Front Range. The
Arapaho and Cheyenne were also nomads, following buffalo herds on the plains
but also ranging into the mountains to hunt and forage. This drew them into
conflict with the Ute, who resisted any encroachment on their traditional
hunting grounds.
Mining
The United States acquired the Gilpin County area as part of
the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and by the 1820s fur trappers were plying the
headwaters and streams of the high country for beaver and other pelts.
Permanent white settlement of the Gilpin County area began
during the Colorado Gold Rush of 1859. John H. Gregory, a miner travelling
from Georgia to California, stopped in Colorado in the fall of 1858 and made
the first gold discovery in Gilpin County west of present-day Central City.
Gregory waited until the following spring to stake his claim in what became
known as Gregory Gulch. By the summer of 1859, the area became known as
Gregory’s Diggings, and thousands of miners traveled there in an attempt to
make their fortunes. The mining settlement near the diggings became known as
Mountain City. Early miners practiced placer mining—panning for loose gold—in
streams and creeks, pulling out $241,918 worth of gold by 1867. They also
engaged in hydraulic mining, which uses high-pressure water hoses to blast away
hillsides of gold-containing gravel and wash it down into a sluice. However,
the real money lay not in surface gold but in deep, gold-bearing quartz veins,
many of which were also discovered in the spring of 1859. These included the Bates
Lode, the Gunnell, Kansas and Burroughs, the Bobtail Lode, and Russell Gulch.
Using dynamite and coal-powered drilling engines to reach these deeper
deposits, Gilpin County miners extracted more than $9 million worth of lode
gold by 1867.
The towns of Central City, which formed below the Gregory
District, and Black Hawk, located less than a mile farther down the gulch,
supplied miners with equipment, food, and entertainment. Reflecting the
enormous scale of the gold rush, Central City had 10,000 residents within two
months of its founding in 1859. Black Hawk, with more flat land and an ample
water supply to power ore-crushing stamp mills, became an early hub for Gilpin
County gold shipments. The town is said to have gotten its name from an early
stamp mill that was imported from Rock Island, Illinois, and named after the
famous Sauk leader.
Several miles north of Black Hawk, John
Rollins established the town of Rollinsville along a road he was building
that would cross the Continental Divide and connect Denver with the new resort
town of Hot Sulphur Springs in Middle Park. Rollins also helped
maintain early toll roads that linked Golden with Central City and Black Hawk.
Rollinsville was originally formed as a mining town, but after the deposits ran
out, Rollins built the Rollins House Hotel in 1865 as a stopping place for
travelers along the road.
By the end of 1861, Gilpin County was one of the last
productive gold-mining areas remaining in Colorado, accounting for around 40
percent of the territory’s total production. During the next decade, the shift
from placer mining to lode mining and the arrival of railroads signaled the
full industrialization of Gilpin County’s mining.
For a time, stamp mills proved effective in using a series
of hammers and mercury to separate the gold from surrounding ores. But as
miners delved deeper into deposits, the composition of the gold-bearing rock
changed to include sulfides, which needed to be burned off. This required
smelters, facilities that received crushed ore from stamp mills and used
intense heat and a chemical agent to extract the precious metals. Black Hawk’s
first smelter, built in 1865 by James E. Lyon and George Pullman,
proved unsuccessful, but former Brown University chemistry professor Nathaniel
P. Hill built the town’s first functional smelter in 1868. Industrialized
mining put an end to the era of the individual prospector and put the future of
mining in the hands of large mining and ore-processing companies. These
companies provided steady jobs that attracted people from many different
backgrounds. Many miners and mill workers, for instance, were immigrants of
Irish, English, German, and Chinese origin.
Rollins’s road and the rest of Gilpin County’s earliest
wagon roads often proved difficult to travel, especially in the notoriously
unpredictable weather of the Rockies. In addition to making travel easier, the
railroads that arrived in the 1870s helped further industrialize mining by
reducing the cost of shipping metals to market and bringing coal freight that
ensured the efficient operation of mills and smelters. In 1872 W.A.H.
Loveland built his Colorado Central Railroad from Golden to Black Hawk.
This was a narrow gauge line better suited to the steep grades and sharp turns
of the mountainous terrain. The line later extended to Central City.
Central City and Black Hawk prospered in the 1860s and 1870s
and became known as the “richest square mile on earth.” Around 1877, for
instance, a rich silver vein was found north of Black Hawk at Silver Hill. As
in Denver, wealth from mining led to cultural developments. Residents raised
funds to build the Central City Opera House , which opened in 1878, and
four other theaters.
The railroads brought an influx of newcomers and visitors to
Gilpin County, leading to the construction of hotels and other amenities. One
early hotel was the Teller House in Central City, built in
1872. It was a popular stopping place for many travelers, and its history
included a visit from President Ulysses S. Grant in 1873.
In 1886 the Gilpin Tramway was built on a narrow gauge line
only two feet wide. The tramway made it cheaper and easier for mines to
transport their ore to the mills along Clear Creek. For several decades, this
tramway brought ore to Black Hawk for processing. By World War I, mining had
severely declined and the tramway ceased service.
Twentieth Century
In 1903 David Moffat organized the Denver, Northwestern
& Pacific Railway (DN&P), also known as the Moffat Road. He planned to
create a direct route from Denver to Salt Lake City over the Colorado Rockies,
beginning with a standard gauge line over Rollins Pass. This first phase of the
line stretched through Gilpin County, running north of Black Hawk and Central
City to the Continental Divide at the county’s western edge. Though Moffat did
not finish the line before his death, his partners continued the line
to Craig and eventually reached Utah in the 1930s through a series of
constructions and mergers.
The Moffat Road not only opened Denver to train travel
directly to the west but also led to the development of communities along the
line and drew many tourists from Denver and other places east. The settlement
of Tolland, west of Rollinsville, was begun by Katherine Wolcott Toll after her
husband’s death and the arrival of the railroad. She sold plots for mountain
cabins, and the area became a popular summer resort for Denver families.
The most prominent settlement along the Moffat Road,
however, was Lincoln Hills, an all-black resort community built in 1922 by two
African American brothers from Denver: Regneir and Roger Ewalt. While some
residents drove to Lincoln Hills, the Moffat Road allowed easy access via a
convenient train ride from Denver. One of the most prominent lots in the town
was the Winks Lodge, owned by O. Wendell “Winks” and his wife Naomi Hamlet. The
lodge rented cabins and operated from 1925 to 1965. The lodge and the area
attracted visitors from all over the country, including Duke Ellington,
Langston Hughes, and Zora Neal Hurston, among others. Another major site in
Lincoln Hills was Camp Nizhoni, a YWCA girls’ camp established in 1927 for
African American girls who were barred from attending other camps.
During the early twentieth century, mining declined in
Gilpin County. In 1920 Black Hawk’s population hit a low of 250 residents, and
only one mill remained in operation. A spike in the price of gold during the
1930s brought a brief resurgence in placer mining, but overall the area
languished during the Great Depression. The Central City Opera House was restored
in 1932, providing a much-needed tourism boost during lean times. In 1966 the
Central City–Black Hawk National Historic District was established to preserve
and celebrate the cities’ nineteenth-century buildings.
Credit: Colorado Encyclopedia (edited GW)