The Silver Queen of the Rockies ( also known as Georgetown)

Lets face it… we all love gold and silver. I mean its right up there with diamonds and they’re a girls best friend. Well my best friend edges out diamonds, but she’s pretty spectacular. So I guess it’s no surprise that when gold and silver were found in Colorado men came in droves to dig it up out of the ground but girls came to spend it. That’s kinda what we do you know. One of the first towns to strike it rich was Georgetown a small town west of Denver. That’s where they found a boat load of silver. For awhile they were the biggest producers of silver in the United States. So like a bar on Thursday night they had to find a way to get women to come … and fast. So they employed the same tactic as every bar in the world…. they implemented their version of ladies night.  They provided plots of land to the first 10 respectable ladies that applied. While there were no shortage of respectable ladies in the US at that time very few wanted to traipse to a mining town filled will men for a chance they may or may not have a place to live. The thought was that having “respectable women” in the town would provide some class but in the words of my dad “you can’t turn a sows ear into a silk purse no matter how hard you try”. They spared no expense in building the town. Everything oozed class and culture…. except the miners of course. By the 1860s the town had exploded , boasting over 2000 residents. They had churches, schools , gardens and shops….. even 4 fire stations. They also had, just like any mine town, brothels , gambling halls and saloons . I guess you can try to be classy all you want but sometimes the crazy just shows anyway. When your town makes over 200 million in 10 years , that’s over 3 billion by todays standards, there’s a lot of crazy to show. Bless their hearts they kept striving to be a respectable town. They went so far as to make the saloon into a Christian Women’s Hall… I’m sure that didn’t go over to well. They even had their own Frenchmen….. who started a store with money he was given for saving a miners life. That store became a hotel and it still stands today. The Hotel de Paris is at the end of the main street in Georgetown and per our guide its a step back in time if you have the time to see it…. we didn’t :(. But in just walking down the streets of this little town is amazing. The buildings ooze history. Its kinda like being on a movie set for an old western. The brightly painted buildings and tiny stores crammed full of both modern products and antiques are incredible. The town even had its own jail…. granted it wasn’t much of one. I guess people knew how to behave back then. It’s still stands off one of the side streets in town. It has 2 cells and a place for a guard to sit. It was known as the Hotel de Barr…lol. The same lock that was placed on the building in the 1880s still locks the door. While the silver is gone and most of the people have moved away this charming little town in the hills of Colorado is a fabulous place to stop and take a look back in history. While Im not sure if they ever reached the status of classy it’s definitely retained every bit of its charm. I would like to thank the Georgetown Community Center for all the wonderful information about their town and my fabulous guide who drove us through the winding roads to get there.