During Tin Cup’s revival a Town Hall was erected in 1906 and used
for a variety of community affairs. The Town Hall was renovated and
re-painted in 1950 by the Civic Association. Tin Cup had no church.
[Illustration: Bryant McFadden, 1960]
Frank Hall, one of Colorado’s most eminent historians, says in Volume IV
of his comprehensive work that the surface ores were high grade silver,
ranging from 114 to 600 ounces of silver per ton, and that all had
admixtures of gold. In addition there were some excellent placers and
gold lodes. In 1880 the Gold Cup mine sold for $300,000, and the town
was firmly on its way.
By 1881 when George Crofutt wrote his _Grip-Sack Guide of Colorado_ he
reported that Virginia City had changed its name to Tin Cup to conform
with the name of the region. He added that Tin Cup was a prosperous
mining town of six hundred population with twelve stores, several
hostels and one smelter. (He omitted the more flagrant business
emporiums.) He stressed that game was very abundant and gave the fare
for the daily line of sleighs running to St. Elmo.
The Colorado Business directory puts the population figure for 1881 at
five hundred, a hundred less than Crofutt. It is interesting to note on
this matter of population that present-day writers have a habit of
enlarging the figures enormously, especially so-called historians of
ghost towns who generally add a zero to any number they encounter. If
Colorado’s hundreds of mining camps had as many people living in them as
is claimed by post-World War II writers, the state would have been as
populous then as it is now. But it was not.
Tin Cup, despite the fact that it has had enormous publicity through
Pete Smythe’s radio and TV show of the same name and through the
building of an amusement park west of Denver called East Tin Cup, must
be seen in the same light. It was just another mining town, although
colorful in its own way, and by the late 1880’s was very much in
decline.
In 1891 it had a revival and kept going fairly well through that decade.
It picked up even more after the turn of the century when the gold mines
put on larger crews and when dredging machinery was moved in to operate
the placers. But following the usual pattern of these towns, World War I
ushered in a growing paralysis, and by 1917 the Gold Cup mine, Tin Cup’s
mainstay, shut down.
Tin Cup slumbered on in a complete trance except for an occasional
sportsman. Little by little its quaint charm, including fire hydrants
that date from 1891, attracted more people. By 1960 it was a substantial
summer resort with more people taking over the many deserted cabins and
buildings and telling of its unique wild past....
Gothic is reached by returning down the Taylor River to Almont and
taking the road up the East River to its junction with Copper Creek.
Crofutt described it in 1881 as the most important mining camp in
Gunnison County with a population of nine hundred and fifty. It was
established June 8, 1879, and made rapid progress, having many large
stores, hotels, restaurants, saloons, shops of all kinds, a public
school, a smelter (which Frank Hall says never operated), three sawmills
and a weekly newspaper. Shortly its population rose to fifteen hundred.
But, as one old-timer recalled, the Gothic district was the paradise of
prospectors but not of miners. It was streaked on every mountainside
with protruding veins of quartz. A blind man could locate a claim. But
the ore values were not high enough for exploitation. The district had
only its unusual beauty amid its surrounding peaks—Treasury, Cinnamon,
Galena, Baldy, Belleview and Italian—and to the north the towering Elk
Mountains.
Gothic died. Only one resident remained until Dr. John C. Johnson, a
former dean at the Western State College in Gunnison, saw its
possibilities in 1928 for a fully accredited six-weeks summer school—the
Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory—and bought the two-hundred-acre
town. Each year its distinguished staff of scientists invites other
eminent scholars in the biological field to a conference and symposium
at the end of the regular teaching session. Such topics as “The Living
Balance Between Flora and Fauna” are discussed. The laboratory has
brought Gothic into a national prominence never attained by its mines.
The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory with its nine hundred and five
acres of primitive spruce and fir land, which sweep up the side of Baldy
Mountain, made Gothic unique in 1960. It was the only ghost town that
had turned into a school.
[Illustration: Bryant McFadden, 1958]