Colorado Ghost Towns

The first mining in the Crystal area took place in the 1860's, but the roads were so poor it wasn't until the 1880's that it really picked up. There were a half dozen mines by 1893 producing silver, lead, and zinc. The average population in Crystal was 500. There was a hotel, post office, two newspapers(one called the Crystal River Current, the other The Silver Lance), general stores, pool hall, the ...

South Park City is an outdoor, living-history museum, located in Fairplay, CO. In the center of Colorado, at an elevation of 8,500 feet, lies a beautiful valley, surrounded on all sides by majestic mountain ranges. The valley, lush with vegetation and s ...

Ludlow was the site of the most gruesome anti-labor massacre in United States History, called The Ludlow Massacre. On April 20, 1914, coal miners had an ongoing strike - they wanted to join the growing (and still existing) miner's union. They'd been evicted from houses owned by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. They'd set up a tent city on public groundsThat day, the miners and their families were celebrating Greek Easter. With no warning, the "Death Special", an armored car with a machine gun, went through the tent city firing bullets. However, most of the death toll came when the company had Lt. Karl E. Lindenfelter order the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency set fire to the tent city from all sides, trapping mostly children. 18 people were killed, 11 kids, including one family who'd burned to death in a pit they dug to try to escape from the fire. Nobody was ever punished for these incidents, except the surviving miners, who were arrested and blackballed.