I hadn’t been to Silver Plume, Colorado in a couple of years, and decided to make a visit this morning. It was a perfect day to park the Jeep and aimlessly wander up and down the streets of Silver Plume, and imagine how it must have looked in it’s glory days of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Silver Plume is still one of my favorite places in Colorado to snap photos- There is just so much there to see, and I always find something new-old thing I missed before. I make it a point to always leave a street or path unexplored, and I also visit Silver Plume only once a year, that way there will always be “something new” on my next visit. One day I will have seen it all, but that just means I can start over and do it all, street-by-street again, and take photos from entirely different angles!
West of Golden, Colorado in Golden Gate Canyon is a remarkably picturesque stone structure called “Centennial House.” It has sat empty for many decades now, but Centennial House was once an important stop on the stagecoach line from Denver and Golden to the mining towns of Black Hawk, Central City, and Nevadaville. As the name suggests, Centennial House opened for business in 1876, though construction had begun in 1872.
Treveling west through Golden Gate Canyon you will notice Centennial and a scattering of small stone and wood cabins and sheds on the north side of the road. If you are traveling east down Golden Gate Canyon towards Denver, you might just miss it as the impressive old building sits tucked away behind pine trees, tall grass, and long neglected overgrowth. A small turnout allows for parking, but the entire site is private property, fenced, marked, and under surveillance so please admire from the turnout and avoid trespassing.
If a competition were held to crown “Colorado’s Most Unique Town” Guffey would certainly be in the running. Guffey, in the past, has elected cats and dogs Mayor, and until 2011 the town held an annual chicken launch.
Today the town could be classified as a “living ghost town” with a healthy population of around 100. The dirt streets that run through town are home to old cars, cast iron claw-foot bathtubs, coffins, wagons, mining equipment, and just about anything else old and rusty you can think of. A couple of saloons are open to greet thirsty visitors and weekend road-trippers, and there are a large number of picturesque, historic buildings to admire.
Guffey got it’s start in the late-1890s as a typical Colorado mining town, gold, silver, lead, copper, and zinc being found in the area. By 1905 Guffey was already a “has been” among the mining centers and most of the town’s 500 people had moved on. But Guffey never totally “died” and is a very intersting and fun place to visit today.
Guffey is located 46 miles southeast of Fairplay, just off of Highway 9 on Park County Road 102.
In 1971 a book titled “The Killer Legions of Quantrill” was written by Carl Breihan, in the book a previously unpublished (see below) photo of William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, the famous Missouri Partisan, and a man identified tentatively as Confederate General Joseph Orville (Jo) Shelby. The photograph immediately stirred controversy, as many felt the photo depicted niether man.
Bloody Bill Anderson (left) and a mystery man circa 1862, Missouri- The mystery man has been identified as General Jo Shelby or Fletch Taylor
Professional analysis of the photo confirmed that the taller man with the light eyes was, in fact, Bloody Bill Anderson without his signature long hair and beard, around 1861 or 1862. However, positive identification could not be made of the made on the right of the photo. The Missouri State Historical Society which has a copy of the photo identified the man not as General Jo Shelby, but as another famous Missouri Partisan- Fletch Taylor. Both Taylor and Anderson being noted members of Quantrill’s Raiders. But this identification of the man as Fletch Taylor resulted in more argument, as many felt it clearly was not Taylor.
While researching the history of the Confederate underground and secessionist movement in Colorado Territory 1858-1865, I stumbled across the only known photograph of Colonel John Hiffner in an obscure history book chronicling the influential people of Jackson County, Missouri. Colonel John Hiffner had funded and raised a regiment of Confederate sympathizers numbering 600 to 1000 men in southern Colorado in 1861 and 1862. Following the Confederate retreat from Glorieta Pass in early 1862, and the subsequent Union dragnet of Colorado Territory to weed out Southern sympathizers in the spring and summer of 1862, Colonel Hiffner’s Mace’s Hole regiment disbanded and “scatterred to the four winds” with many of the recruits heading to Missouri, including Colonel Hiffner himself, who had family in Clay County, Missouri. Hiffner’s brother and other relatives were continously hounded by Union authorities throughout the war for aiding and abetting Confederate partisan units in Clay County, and John Hiffner never enlisted in any regular Confederate unit, though his biography does claim he served the length of the war in Missouri under General Stirling Price and General Jo Shelby, which lends credibility to the theory that John Hiffner was attached to a lesser-known Missouri Partisan unit.
The only known photograph of Hiffner (below) taken around 1900, shows a gray man, who strikes an uncanny resemblance to the unidentified mystery man in the Bloody Bill Anderson photo. Hiffner’s timeline places him in Missouri, in the same locale as Bloody Bill Anderson in 1862, and it is my opinion that the mystery man in the photo is Colorado’s John Hiffner.
The only known photograph of Colorado’s Confederate Partisan leader Colonel John L. Hiffner, taken later in his life, circa 1900, while living in Jackson County, Missouri
A comparison photo of the Bloody Bill Anderson image and the Hiffner image as well as those of Jo Shelby and Fletch Taylor are provided below for comparison to the Bloody Bill Anderson and mystery man photo. To me, the man clearly resembles Hiffner the most based off of facial structure, eyes, hairline and hairstyle, eyebrows, and the long, slender nose, features which are considerably different on Shelby and Taylor.
Is the mystery man in the Bloody Bill Anderson photo John L. Hiffner?Three images of General Jo Shelby- Note the substantial difference in the eyes, facial shape, and hair, from the mystery man in the Bloody Bill Anderson photo.
A wartime image of Fletch Taylor (left) with Jesse (standing, right) and Frank James (seated)- Taylor shows very little resemblance to the unidentified man in question.
Fletch Taylor, later in life, bears little resemblance to the man in the Anderson photo, or the Hiffner photo
Thank You for visiting! Check out my other blogs on the Civil War in Colorado!
We’ve all heard of Wall Street, Boston, Hollywood, London, and Manhattan, but did you know Colorado has a Wall Street, Boston, and Manhattan too? Wall Street in Boulder County and Manhattan in Larimer County were small mining towns in the late-19th and early-20th Century, Boston, in Summit County, was a seasonal mining camp in that same era. London (there were actually two “North” and “South” London) were a pair of camps located a mile apart on Mosquito Pass in Park County, and were inhabited until the 1930s. Hollywood began it’s short life as a suburb of Victor, Colorado in Teller County, and was swallowed up by Goldfield as that town expanded. The names of these tiny communities represented the high hopes of the miners and their families who once called them home- High hopes that faded and vanished when the veins of gold and silver played out.
Wall Street still has a small population and is home to a quaint mining museum housed in the old Assay office. All that remains of Manhattan is a tiny cemetery, high on a hillside, with the graves of a handful of miners killed in an underground explosion in 1892 which spelled the town’s doom. What remained of Manhattan’s structures were burned to the ground by the Forest Service in the 1930s, and only a few photos remain. Boston, high above timberline, surrounded by snow-capped spires of rock at the head of Mayflower Gulch between Copper Mountain and Leadville still has a scattering of cabins, the fragile remnants of the log boarding house, and rusted relics of mining machinery.
Wall Street, Colorado- Boulder County
Wall Street
Wall Street in the boom days
The monstrous chlorniation mill used for seperating gold from host rock at Wall Street- The first of it’s kind in the United States, and cutting edge technology in it’s day
Remains of the chlorination mill today
The “fancy house” at Wall Street, heavily damaged in the floods of 2013 and since torn down
A glimpse of Boston, Colorado in Summit County, located high above timberline
Boston
Relics of yesterday in a miner’s cabin on the trail to Boston
Boston
The awe inspiring setting of Boston, Colorado
Boston
The boarding house at Boston
Boston
Hollywood, Colorado- A far cry it’s more famous namesake!
Hollywood
Hollywood
Hollywood
London, Colorado
Boarding house at London
London
Mosquito Pass from the inside of the mill at London
Miner’s cabin at London
This tiny, hillside cemetery is all that remains of Manhattan, Colorado
Grave of George Grill, one of the miners killed in the 1892 Manhattan explosion
Another Manhattan burial
Manhattan
A tiny fleck of gold from Manhattan Creek
Manhattan at it’s peak around 1890
Manhattan, Colorado in better days
Manhattan circa 1930
Manhattan around 1930- It had been abandoned for 30 years by the time these photos were taken, the Forest Service burned the buildings shortly after, nothing remains today
Manhattan, Colorado
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