Field Trip!

During our Archaeology class last fall, we took a field trip one day to St. Elmo. This is a fabulous little ghost town in Chaffee County, just west of Buena Vista. It is often referred to as America's best preserved ghost town. How exciting, I love ghosts!


St. Elmo was officially founded in 1880. Like many small towns high in the Rockies, people came here for gold and silver mining. It is reported that there were over 150 mine claims in the area. St. Elmo was considered a Hub town for supplies arriving
by train. At it's peak in the 1890's, the town was fully functioning with saloons, several hotels, a very popular general store, a town hall, a school house and even a telegraph office.



Thanks to the rail line, St. Elmo nearly reached a population of 2000 people at it's peak. When mining began to decline around 1920, the town was sadly abandoned in 1922- a pretty short lived ride for the prospectors here, though lucrative. The Mary Murphy Mine detained over $60,000,000 worth of gold while it was in use.

Though St. Elmo is defined as a 'ghost town' there are actually a few year round residents, like maybe 5 or 10. There are quite a lot of tourists that visit the area in the summer, mostly for recreation (fishing and four wheeling) and for some good old fashioned ghost town site seeing.

Fortunately for the students in my class, we had a very knowledgeable tour guide. My classmate Nick works for a Preservation company that spent a good deal of the summer last year actually working on the preservation of these very buildings. He was able to fill us in on a lot of the areas history, and about the condition of the buildings. Lucky Nick, what a fabulous job!


They've done a tremendous amount of work on in the town already, and there's plenty more to be done. That's the thing about historic preservation, you're work in NEVER done. Time keeps on ticking and things continue to get old. There were some very interesting buildings in town. I especially curious about the building on the left, if you look closely at it, you gotta wonder why the three doors, what was going on here? And below was one of my favorites, the inside of the school house. It looks like the kids just left for the day, still in perfect condition, desks, blackboard and all.

What an amazing town. I would do anything to live just one day in this world back in 1890, just a day to see what it was like. Can you imagine, I'd probably be grateful for the modern conveniences we have today, like indoor plumbing and the lack of corsets, but it would still be cool! Today the town is just very quaint and very quiet, set among some of the most stunning scenery you can imagine. Such a shame the railroad stopped its line here...although, I guess in a lot of ways that's a good thing.