From Central City
Nevadaville is unique for many reasons. It was part of the historic 1859 “Pikes Peak or Bust” gold rush. In 1861 the town was larger than Denver. In 1863 one of Nevadaville’s mines, the Pat Casey (later the Ophir), was sold by its illiterate Irish owner in New York to Wall Street speculators for a fancy sum which started a boom in Gilpin County mines. Stock shares of Nevadaville’s mines were thus the first of Colorado corporations to be quoted on the “big board.”
When John H. Gregory found the first lode gold of Colorado in Gregory Gulch on May 6, 1859, other prospectors immediately pushed up all the tributary gulches. By the latter part of May a number of good claims had been staked on Quartz Hill above Nevada Creek. This creek joins Spring Creek at Central City and together they join Eureka Creek to make the mile-long Gregory Creek. It, in turn, joins the North Fork of Clear Creek at Black Hawk. The closest source of water for the mines on Quartz Hill was Nevada Creek. A camp sprang up immediately, and was named Nevada City.
A great deal of confusion followed this naming. Some referred to it only as Nevada and some as Nevadaville. When the townspeople petitioned for a post office they were given Bald Mountain because of a similarity with Nevada City, California. Nevertheless, increasingly through the years, the residents continued to call it Nevadaville and few people today know of its other names.
The earliest good finds were the Illinois by John Gregory, the Burroughs by Benjamin Burroughs and his brother, and the Casey (or Ophir) by Pat Casey. The Burroughs and Pat Casey were among the founders of Nevadaville.
The town had a long and boisterous life. It was settled largely by Cornish at the western end and by Irish at the eastern. These two groups waged a prolonged and skull-cracking battle with each other until the 1890’s. Then they found it expedient to unite against an influx from the Tyrol of miners who threatened to undercut their wages.
The Cornish (Cousin Jacks) built two charming little churches, an Episcopalian and a Methodist. (Both are now gone.) The Irish drove or walked down to mass at St. Mary’s-of-the-Assumption in Central City, over a mile away. But however earnest their church attendance on Sunday morning, it never altered their beer drinking at Nevadaville’s thirteen saloons that afternoon nor the fights and murders that followed. Two of the latter, both Cousin Jacks killed by Irishmen, were notorious in the annals of Colorado law and were eventually carried to the Supreme Court.
I have told the town’s story at considerable length in Gulch of Gold to which the reader is referred for rollicking details. Nevadaville’s ghost status began in 1920 and worsened for twenty-five years. On the bleak scrubby side of Nevada Hill more and more buildings fell down or were torn down. By World War II only two permanent residents remained, and finally there were none.
