Harvesting Historical Riches

The Last Mill Standing

Telluride is a town of many “firsts.”  Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch robbed their first bank here in 1889.  Two years later the town witnessed the world’s first commercial application of alternating current electrical energy when Lucien L. Nunn hooked up his hydroelectric plant to the Gold King Mine.  In 1996 Telluride and Mountain Village opened the first inter-urban gondola in the U.S.  But Telluride is also a town of several “lasts.”  The mountains surrounding Telluride are dotted with some of the last, best examples of high-altitude historic mining and milling structures in Colorado.

The Lewis Mill, for example, is one of the state’s last precious-metal processing structures with intact, original machinery.  Built in 1907 after the Golden Rose Mining and Milling Company developed claims upstream from Bridal Veil Falls, the wooden mill withstood ninety mountain winters at 12,448 feet before it nearly collapsed from vandalism and natural decay.  Informed of the mill’s plight, Colorado Preservation, Inc., (CPI) placed the structure on its Most Endangered Places list in 1998.  Established the year before, CPI’s Endangered Places Program identifies and attempts to save threatened historic resources.

The mill became an immediate poster child for Colorado’s vanishing mining heritage.  CPI used its image in brochures, press kits, and slide show presentations.  Photo editors at local newspapers could not resist running its likeness with stories about the endangered places list.  Anyone with even a passing interest in the past that saw the mill in one of those papers or brochures understood why historic preservation is important.  Looking at the mill, with its weathered clapboard walls and sharply pitched and badly rusted corrugated metal roof, one wonders how it could still be standing at all.  Or how it was built in the first place.  Or how men could have worked at such extreme altitudes.

But not why.

The mill’s machines tell that story.  In 1907 mule teams hauled prefabricated timbers and all manner of metal contraptions up Bridal Veil Basin from Telluride where men assembled a state-of-the-art gravity concentration mill.  Its components had exotic names—roll crusher, Wilfley table, and Frue vanner—but one purpose.  The machines crushed, ground, separated, sifted, and otherwise processed raw ore from nearby mines so that silver and gold could be extracted.

Silver and gold laced the mountains of Bridal Veil Basin, just as they laced the blood of every man, woman, and child in Telluride in the late eighteenth and early twentieth-century.  The story of these crushers, grinders, separators, and sifters is also the story of the men who operated them.  Not to mention their wives, children, and communities.  If the building collapsed and the machines rusted into tailing piles and washed down the mountain, those stories would wash away with them.

San Miguel County’s open space department parlayed publicity associated with CPI’s Most Endangered Places List into support for the mill’s restoration.  Financial assistance came from all quarters: the State Historical Fund awarded the county two grants totaling $173,000.  The Idarado Mining Company, the towns of Telluride and Mountain Village, San Miguel County itself, and several individuals provided a substantial cash match.

Contractors, lacking mules, hauled materials to the remote job site via helicopter.  Under direction from A-E Design Associates and KRH Group’s Felicia Harmon, workers fixed the roof, stabilized the foundation corners and walls, re-sheathed parts of the exterior walls, and stabilized the mill’s heavy equipment by restoring the first, second, and third-level floors.  If all goes well, the mill may stand for another ninety years.

BY BEN FOGELBERG, Editor