How a Colorado Town Purchased and Preserved a Historic Mining Landscape
Cindy Neely thought the mountain that rises to the north of Silver Plume, Colorado, would make an ideal location for an adventure park—an outdoor recreation site with ziplines, ropes courses, and other physically challenging activities. “It’s a perfect spot for it, because in the valley is Interstate 70, a heavily traveled rural interstate,” she says. “There are [millions of] people a year who go up and down that road, so it would be very visible.”
The trouble was, Neely, a longtime Colorado preservationist, didn’t want an adventure park there. She figured it was only a matter of time before the land, which encompasses parts of Republican Mountain and Silver Plume Mountain, was developed, and she had a feeling the 200-plus residents of the town of Silver Plume wouldn’t want this to happen, either.
The mountainside was already part of the Georgetown-Silver Plume National Historic Landmark District, designated in 1966 for its rich silver-mining history. (Neely and her late husband, Ron Neely, were part of a group that helped define the district’s boundaries in 1976.) But a private mining company had owned 95 claims on the mountain since 1949. At any point it could sell those claims to a developer, and the 25 historic mining sites that are officially part of the landmark district would be in danger of demolition. Each of these sites includes mining structures and artifacts such as headframes, adits, and blacksmith shops.
“This is where silver mining got defined,” Neely says. “This district was the biggest silver producer in the region until Leadville, Colorado, came along in 1877, but between the discovery of silver in 1864–’65 and 1877, this particular set of mines were the place where it was happening, where all the new techniques of silver mining were developed.”
Neely and the county’s Open Space Commission kept in touch
with the owner of the claims, who also hoped to preserve the mountainside’s
mining history. Eventually, the claimowner agreed to sell all 95 claims to the
town, provided it could come up with the $500,000 purchase price (plus around
$50,000 to do the necessary preparations for the sale). The town would have a
year to find the money, starting in January 2022. Neely, who lives in nearby
Georgetown, pitched the idea at a Silver Plume town meeting. “I do the
PowerPoint thing about the mountain and what the choices are,” she says. “At
the end of the PowerPoint I look at them and say, ‘So, do you want to buy a
mountain?’ There’s a little silence in the room and one after another they
said, ‘Yeah, I do.’”
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Lining up legal protection for the site would prove to be complicated. Colorado Open Space Alliance, a group of publicly funded local and regional open space programs, supported the safeguarding of the land, as did the nonprofit Mountain Area Land Trust and other conservation groups. But because the Silver Plume land contains historic mining sites that the town intended to preserve, it fell outside the scope of traditional land conservation, which typically focuses on natural landscapes.
So the Silver Plume team would have to find another entity to work with it on creating an easement to ensure the site’s long-term preservation. Neely knew just the person to ask: Cindy Nasky, director of preservation programs at the nonprofit Colorado Historical Foundation. The organization holds more than 100 conservation easements on historic places throughout the state, including one on the Hotel de Paris Museum, a National Trust Historic Site in Georgetown. Neely believed a hybrid project might fit its parameters. “I think, ‘Well, this is a cultural site,’” she says.
The foundation ultimately agreed to accept an easement on the property, which paved the way for $200,000 in funding from History Colorado’s State Historical Fund. This money followed the town’s initial pledge of $25,000 and additional donations from private citizens and foundations as well as local corporations and nonprofits. The county Open Space Commission had also added $100,000. By January of 2023, Silver Plume had raised all the money, and its purchase of the mountain went through.
Neely, Nasky, and others managed the pieces that would need to fall into place for the easement to be completed, including an environmental assessment and reams of title research. Another to-do: a current conditions report on the site, including its cultural resources. One of the most prominent of these is Smuggler Mine, which operated from the 1890s to the 1950s, producing gold, silver, lead, and zinc. Its 40-foot-tall timber-and-steel headframe is mostly intact and had been stabilized for safety by the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety.
The team divided the mining resources into three categories to make them easier for the town to manage; they labeled Smuggler Mine as one of five “interpretive” sites. Under the conditions of the easement, Silver Plume must preserve and maintain each interpretive site. Eight more are classified as “stewardship” sites. “These are largely inaccessible,” says Nasky. “Stabilization is encouraged but not required.” And the remaining 12 fall under the “ruins” category, reserved for resources that need the least amount of attention. “We had to be considerate of what sort of responsibilities we were going to put on the town of Silver Plume insofar as maintaining it per the conservation easement baseline,” Nasky adds.
In April 2024, the Colorado Historical Foundation and the town of Silver Plume signed the finalized easement, establishing Silver Plume Mountain Park North. In addition to the former claims, the 201-acre park includes slivers of land that had already been transferred to the town by the federal Bureau of Land Management in 1993.
Though the park contains an existing, publicly accessible trail, plans call for an interpretive area at Smuggler Mine in the future. For now, the town and its allies in this project are “still investigating what we have,” says Neely. “It’s not just for the town of Silver Plume,” she adds. “It’s for everybody who drives up that highway. It’s a whole different environment, and you want present-day folks to have that feeling. It’s a mountain experience.”
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