Old Cemetery Ghosts
by Eric Rundle
Title
Old Cemetery Ghosts
Artist
Eric Rundle
Medium
Photograph - Photographs
Description
Traveling along a dirt road on a camping trip to Columbine Campground above Central City, Colorado is where I found this old cemetery. Most of the gravesites here are from the mid 1800’s to the early 1900’s. The city is an historic mining settlement founded in 1859 during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, which came to be known as the "Richest Square Mile on Earth." On May 6, 1859, during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, John H. Gregory found a gold-bearing vein (the Gregory Lode) in Gregory Gulch between Black Hawk and Central City. Within two months many other veins were discovered, including the Bates, Gunnell, Kansas, and Burroughs. By 1860, as many as 10,000 prospectors had flocked to the town, then known as Mountain City, and surrounding prospects, but most soon left, many returning back east. The 1900 census showed 3,114 people. Gold mining in the Central City district decreased rapidly between 1900 to 1920, as the veins were exhausted and the population of Central City and its sister city Black Hawk fell to a few hundred by the 1950s.
Uploaded
March 13th, 2013
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