Georgetown During The Summer

I drove up to Georgetown, Colorado from Denver a few days ago to have a look around. Since it was a weekday afternoon, it was not all that busy, but there were still a few tourists out and about. Georgetown is a small mountain town (elevation 8,500 feet) with about 1,100 people, but with many commercial buildings and homes from the Victorian era. It was first settled in 1859 by miners who discovered gold near there. The gold soon petered out, but a few years later a large vein of silver was discovered, and the population grew to over 10,000. After the collapse of the silver boom in 1893, the population began to dwindle, and the town remained a backwater until the ski industry started to grow in the 1950s and 60s, when it became a stop for tourists and skiers looking for apres-ski spots.

The Hamill House Museum, seen in the photograph on the right, and owned by Historic Georgetown, was built in 1867 by a silver baron. But after the silver boom collapsed and all the mines shut down, the then owners could no longer afford to update the place, and so the house, grounds, and furnishings are mostly all original. Bad luck in the past is often good news for tourists in the present. The Hamill House is reputed to be haunted, with reported sightings of a woman in a Victorian dress wandering around upstairs. Both the Hotel de Paris Museum, built in 1875, and an historic saloon, now an Italian restaurant called "Troias," are also reputed to be haunted. That old saloon is allegedly possessed by a man who was hanged after shooting his opponent during a poker game. But there were, unfortunately, no ghostly sightings while I was in town, and so I headed home in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid Denver's rush hour.