Donated to the Town of Lake City by Stephanie Pierson in July, 2006 This flag pole was brought to the Lake City area by the John O. Robertson Family who initially erected it on their property in the Vickers Ranch Estates Subdivision. Perk Vickers . . . — — Map (db m292098) HM
Burrows Park, Argentum, or Whitecross the name may have changed, yet the community and its place in history have remained the same. Situated within a five-mile long grassy meadow known as Burrows Park, clusters of hotels, blacksmith shops, . . . — — Map (db m177915) HM
Twenty million years ago this entire region was geologically active as massive volcanoes changed the face of the landscape. If you were here 23 million years ago, you would be standing on the northern edge of what is now called the Lake . . . — — Map (db m292667) HM
On April 6, 1883, the trial for Alferd Packer began at the Hinsdale County Courthouse. This trial was for the murder of Israel Swan. On April 13, 1883, Packer was found guilty by a jury and received a death sentence. Packer's First . . . — — Map (db m291799) HM
Beginning in the mid-1870s with windowless log shanties featuring dirt floors and roofs, architectural styles and types of building materials within the Lake City Historic District rapidly developed, an evolution illustrated by these two residences . . . — — Map (db m291967) HM
Lake City is to have an opera house! Those exciting words echoed up and down Silver Street in June, 1883, when it was announced that a select group of Lake City businessmen and capitalists had formed the Lake City Building Association with . . . — — Map (db m292091) HM
Bachelor Cabins, also known as New Carson, is not to be confused with high altitude Old Carson which dates to 1882 when Joseph Christopher Carson — no relation to the famed scout — discovered the Bonanza King Mine on the treeless, 12,500'-elevation . . . — — Map (db m292491) HM
The history of the Bonanza Empire Chief Mine and Mill mirrors the stories told of fleeting fortunes throughout the San Juan Mountains. The initial discovery of the Bonanza Lode was made on July 4, 1885. Little work was completed on the claim until . . . — — Map (db m177867) HM
This narrow-gauge caboose car is a perfect example of those which operated on the Denver & Rio Grande Western (D&RGW) railroad in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Since shorter trains did not require cabooses, Caboose 588 did not operate on the . . . — — Map (db m292583) HM
This unique passenger and freight combine car operated on the Lake City Branch of the Denver & Rio Grande Western (D&RGW) Railroad in the first several decades of the 20th century. After the car sat idle, the Hinsdale County Historical Society . . . — — Map (db m292670) HM
Colorado Stone Quarries, a subsidiary of the international Italian stone quarry corporation R.E.D. Graniti, extracted and donated this 2,300-lb. marble slab from the company's Colorado Yule Marble Quarry in Gunnison County. The slab is displayed at . . . — — Map (db m292298) HM
The tree before you is the largest narrow leaf cottonwood tree in the State of Colorado and second in the nation to a tree located in Murray City, Utah. Indications are that the tree is approximately 140 years old. It was planted in the 19th . . . — — Map (db m292295) HM
In September, 1875, members of the Masonic fraternity proposed the establishment of a lodge in Lake City. Twenty Masons, who felt themselves to be sufficiently permanent residents to affiliate with a local lodge, met on December 4, 1875. To provide . . . — — Map (db m292097) HM
Curtis Manufacturing of St. Louis, Missouri, created this weighty cast iron machine for planing wood which was shipped to Lake City on the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. As a key element of Harry Youmans' Lake City Planing Mill, this steam-powered . . . — — Map (db m292597) HM
Nearly 10,000 years ago, Archaic hunters and gatherers camped along the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River. Here they hunted wild game such as bighorn sheep and elk in these alpine valleys. At the end of the last Ice Age, Archaic big game . . . — — Map (db m292297) HM
Two of Lake City's earliest cabins were built near this location in August, 1874, by Enos Hotchkiss and John Bartholf. The men were part of a road building party which passed through the area while constructing the Saguache & San Juan Toll Road . . . — — Map (db m292188) HM
Recalling the pastorate of her father, Rev. Waller Lile Pierce, at the First Baptist Church of Lake City in 1901 and 1902, Annie Pierce McNally exclaimed, “... if the walls of that church could cry out, what a story of redemption they would tell!” . . . — — Map (db m292173) HM
Tourist or motor courts such as the G & M Cabins present an excellent example of the transformation from mining-based economy to tourism which Lake City experienced in 1930s and 1940s. Special-built “auto camps” such as this — individual rental . . . — — Map (db m292052) HM
Rapid expansion occurred in Lake City on the heels of the arrival of Denver & Rio Grande Railroad on July 20, 1889. Even prior to the railroad's long-anticipated arrival, Trustees for the Town of Lake City began plans for the town's first piped . . . — — Map (db m292599) HM
During his six-plus decades as a Lake City resident from the mid-1890s through the late 1940s, Missouri native William Francis “Billy” Green (1866-1950) was a versatile businessman and public official who also happened to be an inveterate tinkerer. . . . — — Map (db m292197) HM
“The Metropolis of San Juan,” as Lake City was already calling itself in the mid-1870's, was in the midst of a building boom when two young, college-educated men decided to open the city's first drug store in the spring of 1876. The two . . . — — Map (db m292198) HM
Both adversity and opportunity were the result of the Great Fire of 1879 which destroyed the major business district of Lake City. The fire started during the early morning hours of November 8 in a one-room saloon known as "Billy's Place" on Third . . . — — Map (db m292185) HM
After being acquired for public offices in 2000, succeeding layers of stucco and clapboard siding were removed from the exterior of the historic Hughes cabin to reveal hand-hewn log beams of the original small, one-room structure which is now . . . — — Map (db m292099) HM
At its completion in January, 1893, Hinsdale County's new jail was heralded as “one of the handsomest and most substantial jail buildings in this part of the state.” The Lake City TIMES also went on to report that at opening, “the new jail is . . . — — Map (db m292591) HM
Writing in 1937, Lake City newspaper editor William C. Blair observed that the San Juan region had “contributed its share of tragedy, romance and pathos to the history which records the incidents of all mining discovery and development, but in . . . — — Map (db m292290) HM
History swirled in and around the grand false-fronted wooden buildings which formerly tightly filled the area now known as the Lake City Park. Beginning in the mid-1870's this portion of Block 58 developed as Lake City's principal commercial . . . — — Map (db m292054) HM
Town founder Enos T. Hotchkiss (1832-1900) built a dirt-roofed log cabin near this site in August 1874. More permanent structures, like the Finley Block built in 1877, now the Hinsdale County Museum, turned Lake City into the “Metropolis of San . . . — — Map (db m292187) HM
This sign commemorates the location of Lake City's first Post Office in July of 1875. The Barlow & Sanderson Stage & Express Office (1877-1886) was sold to the Colorado & Wyoming Stage, Mail & Express Company in 1884. The present-day route of the . . . — — Map (db m291798) HM
George S. Lee arrived in Hinsdale County from Massachusetts in May, 1877 with ambitious plans for the newly formed Galena Mining District. Lee saw opportunities to invest in the future of Colorado. At the time, the two-hundred-acre town site known . . . — — Map (db m177868) HM
Arkansas native George H. Edwards (1901-1981) was a mid-20th Century civic leader who capitalized on Lake City's emerging tourism-based economy in the years immediately following World War II. Edwards and his wife, Velma, began vacationing in Lake . . . — — Map (db m292186) HM
Gold strike in the San Juans! Word spread like wildfire that summer of 1874, and the following spring prospectors crowded into this hidden mountain valley. They pitched tents and crafted log cabins with dirt floors and sod roofs. In August 1875 the . . . — — Map (db m298157) HM
This location has played an important role in the education of Lake City area children for over a century. Lake City's first private school was organized in 1875 by Prof. T.H. Cannon who taught a class of 40 students “all branches of English” for . . . — — Map (db m292506) HM
Lake City was just beginning to boom when the Rev. Alexander Darley arrived from Del Norte, Colorado Territory, in June of 1876. Within a few weeks, Darley gathered the signatures necessary to charter a congregation, making Lake City's Presbyterian . . . — — Map (db m292199) HM
You are traveling the Silver Thread Byway which traces the first roads through the San Juan Mountains. In 1874 the Saguache and San Juan Wagon Toll Road was built into this high valley. The following summer, the Antelope Park and Lake City Toll . . . — — Map (db m298102) HM
Rose Lime Kiln was built along the banks of Henson Creek in the spring of 1881 by local investor and businessman George S. Lee. At the time, Lee used rare technology that he believed would dramatically change construction material and development. . . . — — Map (db m176748) HM
Ute Indian Museum. This Colorado Historical Society museum interprets history of the Utes, Chief Ouray and his wife Chipeta, who lived and farmed on this site. The high-country Alpine Loop tours ghost towns such as Capitol City, Sherman, . . . — — Map (db m298179) HM
The northwest corner of Gunnison Avenue and Second Street in the Lake City Historic District exemplifies the financial ebb and flow which was typical of boom towns in the western United States in the late 19th Century. Situated at a relatively . . . — — Map (db m291797) HM
John J. Crooke (1824-1911) and his brothers, Lewis Crooke and Robert Crooke, were noted 19th Century metallurgists and New York City industrialists who were responsible for patenting the manufacture of tin-foil in the 1880s. The brothers' . . . — — Map (db m292598) HM
St. James Episcopal Chapel occupies one of Lake City's oldest surviving frame structures, a carpenter shop with vertical board and bat siding which was built in 1875 by a building and contracting firm owned by H.E. Turner and J.B. Lyons. Turner & . . . — — Map (db m292196) HM
Western Colorado's first banking house, the Hinsdale County Bank, opened in Lake City in June of 1876. The bank was a branch of the First National Bank of Colorado Springs and boasted prominent banker H.A. McIntire as president and H.J. Alexander . . . — — Map (db m292157) HM
Excitement was rampant in September of 1877 as Lake City awaited the arrival of a graying spinster nationally known for her strong opinions on liquor abstinence, the role of African Americans in post-Civil War America, and most notably — the . . . — — Map (db m291796) HM
The Hinsdale County Courthouse is a two-story, front-gabled frame building that was built in Italianate style and completed in June of 1877. It is Colorado's oldest courthouse which continues to function as a courthouse and is a rare surviving . . . — — Map (db m292100) HM
Tellurium's history, like that of many mining camps, consisted of booms and busts. From its initial occupation in 1875, it boasted as having two groceries and a post office (1876), but in an unusual statement for a mining camp, it did not have a . . . — — Map (db m177910) HM
The Yule brothers, William and George, are credited with first discovering promising deposits of dense, white marble in apparently limitless quantities while prospecting on Ute Indian lands in the Elk Mountains in 1874. The marble, it was said, was . . . — — Map (db m292486) HM
This land once belonged to the Utes — “the mountain people” — who hunted and lived here for generations. Their footpaths wound over the slopes and through the valleys. But in 1858, gold was found near present-day Denver, and the rush to the Rockies . . . — — Map (db m298072) HM
Living conditions were often deplorable in the Galena Mining District. Miners often lived in company supplied boarding houses set up in close proximity to the mines. The houses were poorly built, drafty, and had leaky roofs. Although conditions at . . . — — Map (db m177890) HM
The Ute Indians who inhabited what is now Colorado, Utah, and northern New Mexico were organized into small family bands. They migrated seasonally between the mountains and the deserts and foothills in search of game and wild plants and to . . . — — Map (db m177848) HM
As the primary impetus of Lake City's initial boom and the mainstay of its survival through the mid-1900s, the Ute-Ulay Mine and Mill Complex is linked to Hinsdale's county seat and only incorporated town emotionally and irrevocably. Architecture . . . — — Map (db m177908) HM
Henry C. & Eugenie W. Olney, J.W. Mills and others formed local Women’s Suffrage Assn. here after Susan B. Anthony’s visit, Sept. 1877. — — Map (db m279600) HM
At 2:14 AM on March 24, 1929, the Big Slide on the north side of Gravel Mountain tore loose and buried the Bonanza Empire Chief main office building, a dining hall/bunk house, and a five-room bunkhouse. Two cooks - Mrs. Mayme Watson and Mrs. E.L. . . . — — Map (db m177866) HM
