With abandoned mines, dusty streets and ramshackle buildings, Colorado’s ghost towns have a knack for giving visitors goosebumps.
Colorado has roughly 300 ghost towns throughout the state, mostly concentrated deep in the mountains, where miners — who had dreams of striking it rich — set up settlements, and along the Eastern Plains, explained Tom Noel, a state historian who is known as “Dr. Colorado.” Noel defined ghost towns as a place that had a post office that is now closed.
The silver crash in 1893 depleted towns of their populations, although a couple stragglers still stuck around some places. Gold mining towns were already disappearing before then, Noel said. Although the remaining gold mining towns tended to survive the crash, they still ended up dying after.
It’s certainly eerie to think of these once-booming mining towns being deserted en masse, leaving relics behind that give us tantalizing clues into the state’s Wild West past, such as the graveyards with the names of ill-fated sheriffs in one infamous ghost town.
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St. Elmo and Tin Cup
Near Buena Vista
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