Monthly Archives: August 2022

All-in-One: Grassy, Cameron & Pinnacle Park, Colorado

c 2022 by Jan MacKell Collins

Portions of this article are excerpted from Lost Ghost Towns of Teller County

Cameron was first known as Grassy, although it was sometimes misspelled on various maps as “Gassy” and “Gassey.” Less-than-astute historians have joked that the community was named after the digestive conditions suffered by a nearby rancher. On a more factual note, Grassy was so-named because it was located in a wide, grass-filled meadow at the edge of a forest. Mines of the Cripple Creek District were nearby and, unlike the hilly and steep streets of the most area towns, Grassy’s flat ground made it very easy to lay out.

   Grassy was almost named Cripple Creek when it was first founded. This was back when Cripple Creek as it is known today was divided by two separate towns, Fremont and Hayden Placer. The towns were ensconced in a heated battle over who would be first to secure a post office. Fremont wanted its name, but Hayden Placer took a competitive edge by choosing the name “Moreland,” a brilliant marketing move that implied that one could acquire “more land” by buying lots there. When the post office accepted Moreland’s name, Fremont founders Horace Bennett and Julius Myers took the competition one step further. In March of 1892, they filed a plat on the northeastern most section of the former Broken Box Ranch and called it Cripple Creek. Promotors Hayden Placer and Fremont had the last laugh, however, when the post office decided to simply combine them into one city and designated the post office name as Cripple Creek.

   In light of the post-designated Cripple Creek, Bennett and Myers changed the name of their platted Cripple Creek to Grassy when it was officially founded in February of 1892. The men had realized that Grassy could become an important mining and railroad hub. The town was officially platted on October 29, 1894 and was intended to be a large city. The main avenues were Prospect, Wolcott, Teller, Blaine, Cleveland, Townsend, Routt, Pitkin and Sherman, intersected by streets numbered one through five. The Midland Terminal Railroad intersected the east half of the town, with a tidy depot located on the southeast corner of Teller and 3rd. Stage services were offered for a time, wherein passengers were brought to the depot to ride the train to Divide and beyond. Meanwhile, the Midland Terminal railroad continued laying tracks headed to the rest of the Cripple Creek District.

   It was soon apparent that Grassy would not be developing very fast, for it was a tad too far from other, more important towns, in the district. A small portion of Grassy was vacated in August of 1895, and by 1899 the town in its entirety was up for sale. Enter the Woods Investment Company, comprised of budding millionaire Warren Woods and his sons Harry and Frank. The Woods boys were already making a big splash in nearby Victor, where they had built much of the town (and rebuilt it after a devastating fire in August of 1899). The Woods purchased the Grassy town site at a cost of $123,000 for 183 acres. The investment was solid enough, for surrounding mines had produced $250,000 in gold ore just that year. Miners, laborers, railroad workers, ranchers, and others were soon moving to Grassy.

   The Woods renamed their newly-acquired town. In July of 1899, the Cripple Creek Morning Times reported that the “Cameron Company that now owns the Grassy townsite, has changed the name of the place to Cameron. Several new houses are now in course of construction there. “Beginning on August 3, Cameron began appearing on the timetables as a stop along the Midland Terminal Railroad. Nice brick structures now lined Cameron Avenue. There were three saloons and even a newspaper, the Golden Crescent. Yet Cameron continued struggling to draw residents and visitors.

   Then, on August 10, readers of the Cripple Creek Morning Times saw a most interesting article. “Sunday an excursion will be run from this city to Cameron, formerly Grassy,” reported the Times. “Pinnacle Park, at Cameron, promises to be a very attractive pleasure resort.” What was Pinnacle Park, readers wondered. It turned out that the Woods had come up with a fabulous idea to draw folks to Cameron. They built a giant amusement park, Pinnacle Park, for the people of the Cripple Creek District to enjoy.

   Spanning thirty acres, Pinnacle Park was built at a cost of $32,500. Matthew Lockwood McBird, son of noted Denver architect Matthew John McBird, and who designed numerous buildings in Victor, was hired to draw plans for the buildings at the new park. McBird was perfect for the job, and was described as “a bit of a visionary, a dreamer and creator.” The fact that he never officially held an architect license in Colorado hardly seemed to slow him down. The man had learned well from his father, and assigned himself to building Pinnacle Park with vigor.

   McBird’s designs gave the buildings at Pinnacle Park hip roofs and angled logs to give the park a rustic look. The place afforded the amenities of any great amusement park: a large wooden dance pavilion with a bandstand, a picnic area, restaurants, carnival games, and an athletic field with seating for up to a thousand spectators. Football and baseball games were the main attraction. Nearby, a zoo exhibited native animals. There was also a playground with assorted popular rides of the day. Entrance to the park was gained via Acacia Avenue, and the Midland Terminal Railroad tracks cut directly through the middle of the park. Visitors came by rail, horseback and carriage, gaining entrance through elaborate wooden arches.

   The first Labor Day celebrated at Pinnacle Park was amazing indeed. Although plans were already in the works for a great festival with a “grand picnic,” the event was turned into a “benefit of the families of Coeur d’Alene miners” who were suffering through violent labor strikes in Idaho. The final plans for Labor Day would feature a baseball game among the Cripple Creek District’s teams. There were a number of other events as well, including greased pole climbing, a “slow burro” race, a sack race, a fifty yard “Fat Man’s” race, a horse race and a dance. Modest entrance fees were charged for everything in the effort to raise money for those in Coeur d’Alene.

   Neither the promoters nor the guests at Pinnacle Park were disappointed. The Labor Day celebration was deemed a great success, from a parade spanning twenty-two blocks which made its way from Cripple Creek, to the games, craft booths, lemonade and cigar stands and entertainment at the park. “The outgoing trains from Cripple Creek to Pinnacle Park were so crowded,” reported the Cripple Creek Morning Times, “that people hung on the sides and scrambled all over the tops of the coaches to get a place to sit.” Furthermore, a “solid stream” of wagons stretched from Tenderfoot Hill above Cripple Creek all the way to Cameron. What a site that must have been!

   In all, over six thousand dollars was raised for the mining families of Coeur d’Alene. Residents of the District came away from Pinnacle Park happy to have had such a day to relax with each other, with no incidents reported amongst the party goers. “It is doubtful if the people of the district ever appreciated before yesterday’s parade what a host of organized working men there are here,” concluded the Times, “or how many different trades and crafts are in the camp.”

   Cameron continued experiencing success. On September 30, an announcement was made that a new “broad gauge” railroad was planned from Colorado Springs to Cameron. The project was led by Irving Howbert and E.W. Gidding of the Cripple Creek District Electric railway, who had hired contractors Clough and Anderson to complete the work. By October, the school at Cameron had fifty two pupils. On December 8 a new post office was established. The name of the office was Touraine, however, “there being a Cameron in another portion of the state,” according to post office officials. The Woods Investment Company closed the year by announcing plans for the Gillett Light & Power Company, which would supply light to both the nearby city of Gillett, and Cameron.

   Interesting is that both the former town of Grassy and the new town of Cameron were listed in the Cripple Creek District directory in 1900. The reason was because the Woods had not yet filed a new plat map for Cameron. The growing population is exhibited by the fact that the Cameron School operated in town proper but a second town, identified as Lower Grassy School appears in the directory as well. Apparently, a portion of old Grassy now functioned as a suburb of Cameron. In Cameron proper, the downtown area offered an exciting array of business houses. The Arcade Saloon and the Cameron Club Saloon and Barber Shop attracted miners, while the more domestic could choose from a number of stores that included Butter’s Store, Home Bakery, Cameron Mercantile Co., G.G. Sweet & Company’s meats and groceries, Williams Dairy, and of course Pinnacle Park.

   As promised, citizens would also benefit from what the Woods called the Golden Crescent Water and Power Company. Within a year, running water would also be furnished to both Cameron and Gillett from Woods Lake. Yet it wasn’t until April 14, 1900 that the new and much improved Cameron was officially platted. C.L. Arzeno and Frank Woods were listed as principle officers on the plat map as Vice President and Secretary, respectively. Unlike nearby Beaver Park, whose naming of “streets” designated it as a blue collar town, Cameron’s roads were called “avenues” and named after local landmarks, including some important mines. The new names included Gillette, Hoosier, Isabella, Touraine, Damon, Pinnacle and Acacia. Just in case rich ore was found beneath the surface of the town, the Woods and Arzeno also wisely retained the mineral rights of all property within the town.

   Labor Day of 1900 appears to have been the record breaker of attendance at Pinnacle Park, when an astounding nine thousand people attended for a day of festivities. Admission was ten cents per head, yielding $900 for the day at the park – nearly $32,000 in today’s money. For a few glorious years, thousands of visitors came to Pinnacle Park every weekend and holiday during the summer. An April, 1900 issue of the Aspen Daily Times also announced that the “continued discovery of gold in the vicinity of Gillett and Cameron confirm the theory so long urged that the Cripple Creek veins extend to an unknown distance to the north.” Mines around Cameron included the Elsmere, Lansing and Wild Horse.

   The Colorado Springs & Cripple Creek District Railroad, a.k.a. “The Short Line”, reached Cameron in March of 1901. A month later, the old post office name of Touraine was finally changed to Cameron. And once again, Pinnacle Park saw record attendance at Labor Day. For a time, it seemed as though Cameron would champion as a leading town in the Cripple Creek District – but that all changed in about 1903, when Cameron’s popularity began fading. The mines around Cameron began playing out and rumors abounded that the Woods boys were in financial trouble. Sales of residential lots at Cameron  came to a stop.

By the time the 1902-03 Cripple Creek District Directory was published, Cameron’s population had shrunk to around 300. The directory now described the town as “small” and located “on the site of the old Grassy settlement”. There was still an Episcopal church, a city hall, Kings Hall and three other clubs, but the business district had dwindled considerably to only a boardinghouse, a grocery, one doctor and the Cameron Crescent.

   The notorious, tumultuous labor wars of 1903-1904 in the Cripple Creek District in took a further toll on Cameron, which was located dangerously close to the center of the mining strikes. The Cameron Crescent went out of business, and in March, several blocks in town were officially vacated. A few months later, just five days into the labor strikes, “Big Bill” Haywood gave a rousing speech to a group of union men at a Pinnacle Park picnic. Haywood urged the miners “to stand with” the Western Federation of Miners until the strike against mine owners was victorious. But owing to the lack of news articles about Cameron during the labor strikes, it would appear that citizens wanted as little to do with the fracas as possible.

Cameron still had about 300 residents in 1905, but notably, neither of the two churches had a pastor and both congregations met at Town Hall. There was still a boardinghouse, general merchandise, grocery, hotel and shoe store, but Cameron was most certainly suffering a slow death. Even though there were a few more businesses in 1907, the population was only 200. The Colorado State Business Directory for 1908 reported the number of residents at one hundred. It would also be the last time Pinnacle Park, now under the management of one Thomas Morris, was listed in any directory. The park closed shortly afterwards. Cameron’s post office closed in August of 1909. A year later, only 50 residents remained in the city proper. By 1912, Cameron appeared as a suburb of Cripple Creek in city directories. Finally, in 1917, Cameron was vacated altogether. Children in the area were able to continued attending the Cameron School until it officially closed in 1921. By that time, only six pupils and their teacher, Miss Mannering, were left.

   The fancy log fence around Pinnacle Park, along with its quaint buildings, was eventually torn down. For years, the logs lay in a heap in the woods just off the former railbed of the Midland Terminal. Brick enclosures built to house bears and wildcats at the Pinnacle Park Zoo were the only remnants left until 2010, when they were dismantled in the wake of mining operations. The materials were stored by the City of Cripple Creek until 2014, when they were reconstructed at the Cripple Creek District Museum. By 2015, what was left of Cameron was quickly being buried under modern mining tailings, and the town is officially no more.

Barry, Colorado: An Early Town in the Cripple Creek District

c 2022 by Jan MacKell Collins

Portions of this article are excerpted from Lost Ghost Towns of Teller County, Colorado.

As the Cripple Creek District developed into the last official gold boom in Colorado, thousands of miners flocked to the region seeking fortune. Within an incredibly short time, hundreds prospect holes dotted the landscape. In one area, located roughly halfway between Cripple Creek and Victor, the body of what was called “a female aborigine” was unearthed. The remains were most likely those of the Ute tribe, since those Natives once favored the area as a summer hunting ground. The area where the woman was found became known as Squaw Gulch.

Leslie Doyle Spell, whose family had been living in Florissant, recalled moving to a new home at Squaw Gulch. “This was a two-room cabin,” he remembered, “with one room used for eating, sleeping and general use while the other was to serve as sleeping quarters for the men.” Spell also remembered a young woman, Emma Rickett of Florissant, who had been hired to help his mother. After Emma died “an agonizing death from blood poisoning,” she became the first woman buried in what was later Mt Pisgah Cemetery in Cripple Creek. There were other tragedies as well: Spell also recalled to small children who were killed by a bear soon after the family arrived in Squaw Gulch. “Quite often,” he said, “while sitting on the porch of our cabin or playing nearby, we would be startled almost out of our wits by the screams of panthers, or mountain lions, in the nearby forests.”

The primitive school at Squaw Gulch was a log house, built by and lived in by cobbler Fred Hackey. The first Christmas at Squaw Gulch merited mention in the Colorado Springs Daily Gazette, which remarked, “Christmas passed very quickly up here and, indeed it seemed hard to realize that it was Christmas. In the evening a dance was held in the loft over Sills & Mills grocery store in Squaw Gulch…a very pleasant evening and their first in Cripple Creek.”

In 1892 Spell’s father, William, donated a lot and building materials for a proper school. His only request was that, should the time come when the building was no longer used for a school, it was to be used for “inter-denominational church services.” Spell became a true leader of the early booming Cripple Creek District, eventually being appointed marshal of Fremont and Placer (which later became Cripple Creek), Mound City and Squaw Gulch. Squaw Gulch even had a small jail, built primarily for the son of a prominent rancher who often wandered home drunk from the saloons and dance halls in nearby Cripple Creek.

As the town grew, Spell remembered brothers Bill and Vint Barry coming to Squaw Gulch and renaming the town for themselves. While laying out their town, the brothers encountered one Andy Frazier, whose cabin sat right in the path of the new main road. Frazier refused to move, explaining his wife was expecting a baby at any moment and besides, he had squatter’s rights. The Barrys built a new house along the proposed street and presented it to Frazier as a gift. The property did not, however, include mineral rights. The Barry brothers might have decided to keep those for themselves, should gold be found in the town.

Spell’s account of the Barry brothers is confusing, since other sources claim that Barry was named for Horace Barry, one of the many prospectors who staked several claims and struck it mildly rich. By the time he came to the District, Barry had already been dabbling in mining for some time. The 1880 census verifies he was working as a miner in Silver Cliff, another mining town in southern Colorado. Upon founding his namesake town, Barry told others he believed the little village would become the “cultural center” of the district. Although Barry merely consisted of a few log cabins and some tents,  its founding father set off a wave of optimism that seemed to affect everyone who came there. Notably, Spell’s recollection came from his memories of actually living in Barry, so his story of the renaming of Squaw Gulch certainly deserves mention and perhaps further discourse.

However Barry was named, nobody seemed to mind losing the name of Squaw Gulch. Barry’s post office opened on March 1, 1892. The small town prospered. Surrounding mines were doing well, and many of Barry’s male residents were employed by the Blue Bell Mine. Shops, restaurants and two or three neat rows of homes lined the road up Squaw Gulch. There were also a slew of new residents. One of them was H. Susan Anderson. “Doc  Susie,” as she was later known, was born in Indiana in 1870. When her parents divorced in 1875, Susan’s father William took custody of Susan and her younger brother John. By the early 1880’s the family was living on a farm in Kansas, where Susan learned to “doctor” the animals around the homestead. The family also resided in Indiana and Iowa, where in 1892 William Anderson married Minnie Croy.

In early 1892 the Andersons moved to Barry, where William pursued mining interests. Shortly after their arrival, Susan and John were sent off to college. Susan’s chosen field was medicine. In 1893 she traveled to the University of Michigan to begin her studies. Midway through her classes, however, Susan’s father cut off her financial report. Susan persevered, borrowing money from a classmate and finishing her schooling. Despite contracting tuberculosis during her internship, Susan graduated in 1897. Upon returning to the Cripple Creek District, she opened an office in Cripple Creek and lived with her grandparents. Being the only female physician in town must have been difficult, but she began taking in more patients after managing to save a boy’s arm from amputation. By 1900 she was making plans to marry. When her fiance and father had some sort of falling out, however, the former broke off the engagement. A few days later Susan’s brother John died from pneumonia at the nearby town of Anaconda. The heartbroken doctor left the Cripple Creek District, finally managing to establish herself in the northern town of Fraser. Doc Susie lived in Fraser until her death in Denver in 1960. She is buried in Cripple Creek.

A more well-known citizen of Barry in the early days was Judge M.B. Gerry, the man who sentenced Colorado cannibal Alfred Packer to hang in 1883. Gerry was a member of Horace Barry’s Squaw Gulch Amusement Club, as were prominent rancher George Carr and well-known cowboy Bob Womack. Tongue-in-cheek advertisements for the club boasted “a membership of 400, of which 399 are from the high-toned aristocratic circles of Squaw Gulch.” Square dances and libations were offered up at the Club, and for a short time the place was the premier social center of the neighborhood.

Not surprisingly, the Squaw Gulch Amusement Club proved lucrative for the soiled doves who eventually flew into town. Les Spell remembered when a brothel opened in the vacant house next to the family home. The place maintained a low profile, and one of the girls had a little boy who often played alone in his backyard. One day Spell’s brother asked the boy to come over and play. The child replied, “No, my mother is a whore and says I am to stay home.” Another time, a cowboy was sleeping off a drunk at the house of his favorite call girl. As he slept, the gentleman’s mischievous companion donned his overalls and rode down Main Street on his horse.

Barry had other amusements too. There were two newspapers, Write Up the Camp and the Squaw Gulch Nugget. Articles might have included news on Horace Barry, who was investing in various mine interests and was an officer at Sam Altman’s Free Coinage Mine above Victor. Barry, however, was also suffering some setbacks with his investments. In January of 1893, The Aspen Daily Times reported that “John F. Newman filed this  morning in the district court a suit for $125,000 and legal interest from April 5, 1892, to the day of judgement against Horace W. Barry and Caleb W. Barry. The plaintiff alleges that he was the owner of 100,000 shares of mining stock of the Anaconda Mining & Milling Company at Cripple Creek until about April 5, 1892. That the defendant and other parties misrepresented the value of the stock b reporting falsely upon the output of the property and thus inducing the plaintiff to dispose of his stock for $5000.00 to the defendant, Horace W. Barry, and that he did not discover the intent to defraud him until October.”

Barry’s namesake town, meanwhile, was also being swallowed up by the new town of Anaconda at the head of Squaw Gulch. The town newspapers went out of business, and in December of 1893 the post office was moved to Anaconda. By 1894 Barry had been totally absorbed by the larger town. Horace Barry eventually left the area, and continued dabbling in mining. By 1899 he was in Denver, and in 1903 the Iowa Press-Citizen newspaper in his home state of Iowa reported, “The Valley Mining company today sued its general manager, H.W. Barry, M.I. Barry and Laura Barry Elmendorf, for $2,000 in damages, and asked for writ of attachment against Mr. Barry’s property and against certain shares of stock, now held by the other defendants. The petition avers that Barry made misrepresentations as to the title of certain property, and that he misused funds entrusted to him. The plaintiff further declares that Mr. Barry has disappeared from Silver Cliff.” Barry later surfaced briefly in Denver and California before disappearing altogether.

Image: Barry as it appeared circa 1893. Fred M. Mazzulla collection.