St. Elmo ghost town

One of the founders named this town after the novel he happened to be reading.

Saint Elmo sits in the heart of the Sawatch Range in Chaffee County, Colorado, in Chalk Creek Canyon about 20 miles southwest of Buena Vista, at 9,961 feet. Prospectors had been working the area since the 1870s and the town was founded in 1880. It was originally called Forest City, but there were far too many Forest Citys, so Griffith Evans changed it to the title of the book in his hands.

Nearly 2,000 people arrived once gold and silver mining got going. At its peak in the 1890s the town had a telegraph office, a general store, a town hall, five hotels, saloons, dancing halls, a newspaper office and a school house. The St. Elmo Mountaineer, its first and longest running paper, started reporting on the mines in August 1880 and ran until 1895. The Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad line came through. There were 150 patented mine claims in the area, and most people worked the Mary Murphy, the Teresa C., the Molly or the Pioneer. The Mary Murphy was the largest and most successful of them.

The Colorado Encyclopedia sets out the decline: growth stalled in the late 1880s, and the population fell after fires and the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Mining declined through the early 1920s and in 1922 the railroad discontinued service. By the 1940s the town had two full-time residents.

It is listed on the National Register as the Saint Elmo Historic District, and it is one of Colorado's best preserved ghost towns. When a major fire burned the town hall in April 2002, Buena Vista Heritage reconstructed the building with help from the State Historical Fund and private donations, and it reopened in 2008 as a museum of local history.