c 2022 by Jan MacKell Collins
This is the first of several installments with excerpts from articles about the Cripple Creek District of Colorado, as well as Jan’s book, Lost Ghosts Towns of Teller County, Colorado.
It is surmised that the village of Alnwick, located at the confluence of Four Mile Creek and West Four Mile Creek, was named for the most historic place and castle of the same name in England. A post office opened there on August 11, 1887 in what was then El Paso County. At the time, Alnwick was one of the very few stops for ranchers and farmers wishing to access Canon City from Teller County. There was plenty of water along what was then known as Oil Creek, and the budding hamlet was comfortably nestled along a high-rise bank well out of flash flood danger.
By 1892, with the gold boom going on in the nearby Cripple Creek District, the founders of Alnwick stepped things up a bit and officially platted the town on March 23. Some of the streets were given the names of Collbran, Hagerman and Howbert, likely in hopes that railroad moguls Henry Collbran, J.J. Hagerman and Irving Howbert might build a railroad through there someday. In November, the United States Geological Survey party visited. The Aspen Daily Chronicle gave details:
“Mssrs. W.S. Post, W.L. Wilson, and T.M. Bannon, of the United States Geological Survey, have been at Cripple Creek this week. They compose the surveying party which four the last two months has been engaged in surveying this district for the purpose of making an official topographical map. The survey extends from Pikes Peak on the northeast to Florissant and Lake George on the Northwest, and almost to Canon City on the south. It will be a valuable and thoroughly reliable map and will comprise nearly 30 miles square, with Cripple Creek in the center. The survey is no almost completed, the last camp of the party now being located at Alnwick.”
Efforts to make Alnwick the central hub between Cripple Creek and Canon City were for naught. The post office closed on October 26, 1893. In March of 1894, the town was vacated. A short time later, geologist Charles Whitman Cross noted that the “Alnwick lake beds” were made up of “fine-grained sandstone and conglomerate, the latter containing pebbles representative of the volcanic series to west.” Alnwick Lake was mentioned in passing again in 1906 as Henry Gannett, in his Gazetteer of Colorado, called Alnwick “a village.”
Nothing more was mentioned about Alnwick until 1974, when another report stated the area was “abandoned.” Today Alnwick is comprised of nothing more than the meadow of an historic ranch. The road leading to it is privately owned by a local outfitter.
Image: Alnwick, Colorado as it appeared in 2016. Copyright Jan MacKell Collins.
Jan MacKell Collins 