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)