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Perhaps there's a silver lining in the cloud of smoke that engulfed St. Elmo last week when a fire destroyed five old buildings, among them the 1892 town hall.
St. Elmo may be the most photographed ghost town in the West, and for good reason -- it was the quintessential Colorado ghost town. It had everything a ghost town is supposed to have.
As a railroad buff, I'll start there. The Denver, South Park & Pacific (it went through several other names before becoming part of the Colorado & Southern early in the 20th century) was among Colorado's pioneer narrow-gauge lines. It followed the South Platte River into South Park; you can still see the grade by Kenosha Pass, as well as the depot in Jefferson and the roundhouse and hotel at Como.
There it branched, with one line going over Boreas Pass to Breckenridge and then up Frémont Pass to Climax and down to Leadville (that last stretch was standard-gauged in 1943, and now operates in the summer with passenger excursions on the Leadville, Colorado & Southern RR).
The other branch crossed Trout Creek Pass and descended to Nathrop, climbed up Chalk Creek to the Alpine Tunnel, then down Quartz Creek to Gunnison.
St. Elmo sits on Chalk Creek, just off the old main line. Two old boxcar bodies remain -- perhaps the last surviving C&S narrow-gauge equipment.
The Alpine Tunnel, a few miles west of St. Elmo, was the first tunnel through the Continental Divide in the United States. Men died building it and men died inside it until it went out of service in 1910.
Thanks to the nearby Mary Murphy Mine, there was enough traffic on the east side to keep an occasional train running to St. Elmo until 1926, when the rails came up.
That's just a start on the narrow-gauge railroad lore thereabouts. There's mining lore aplenty, too. The Murphy was the mainstay of the district, and in the late 1970s, when silver and gold prices were reaching astonishing levels ($800 an ounce for gold), work started to put the Murphy back into production.
Perhaps fortunately for the cause of historic preservation, prices dropped before the mining company could remove all the old structures that were in the way of a modern operation.
Just below St. Elmo is a washed-out dam. It was part of a hydro-electric generating system that was built in 1913 to power some bucket dredges across Tincup Pass in Taylor Park.
St. Elmo had its railroad and mines and related industries. But it also had Tony and Annabelle Stark, a brother and sister who hung on there into the 1950s, running the general store and Home Comfort Hotel long after everyone else had moved away.
The Home Comfort still remains, but today there's a gap across the street where the town hall stood until last week.
The fire of 2002 -- apparently started by an electrical
malfunction -- was hardly the first fire to strike St.
Elmo. The town was founded in 1880, and by 1885, it had
500 people, with several general merchandise stores,
hotels, smelting works, and one weekly newspaper,
according to a contemporary guidebook.
But in 1890, a fire destroyed the town hall, along with the post office, the newspaper, a bakery and a warehouse. The postmaster, Fred Brush, carried the mail out and saved it, but didn't have time to save the liquor supply, too. People argued about his decision as to what was worth saving. A few months later, another fire took out a hardware store and severely damaged a grocery and hotel.
In January of 1898, a newspaper recounted that A
disastrous fire broke out at 3 A.M. ... which destroyed
some of the best business houses and caused a loss between
$15,000 and $20,000.... the water works of the town were
found to be useless, as the extreme cold weather had frozen
the water in the pipes... the two principal stores ... are
a total loss.
Fires were the bane of mining towns. Everyone heated with wood or coal, producing sparks and hot ashes. Since no one knew how long the veins might last, construction was wood rather than brick or stone. So there was plenty to start a fire, and little to stop its spread.
Often the fire killed the town, as no one bothered to rebuild because they all moved on to a more promising spot. If the mines remained productive, then the commercial district got rebuilt in brick, as with Cripple Creek and Leadville.
St. Elmo was an exception. They rebuilt with wood, and the wood survived, so that it was easy to sit there on a summer afternoon and imagine how it might have been back in about 1892 when St. Elmo had a future, rather than just a past.
Now we can add the fire of 2002 to that past -- a stark reminder that fires, along with abandonment and decay, are part of our history, too. If we can remember that once in a while, along with the romance of the past, then that knowledge might serve as the silver lining.
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