Granite is an unincorporated community with a U.S. Post Office in Chaffee County, Colorado, United States. The zip code of Granite is 81228. According to the 2010 census, the population is 116.
Situated between the Mosquito and the Sawatch mountain ranges, Granite is a high mountain town located on the Arkansas River midway between Leadville to the north, and Buena Vista to the south. It is in close proximity to the second and third highest peaks in the contiguous United States, Mount Elbert and Mount Massive.
The town has a rich history from its days during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush, when it began as a mining camp, holding the county seat. Early prospectors, such as Horace Tabor, were attracted to the area.
Geography and climate
Granite is located midway between Leadville to the north, and Buena Vista to the south. The Arkansas River, which once saw extensive placer mining during the Colorado Gold Rush, runs through Granite. It is the sixth longest river in the US; the headwater is 17 miles north in the Leadville area. Granite is located between two mountain ranges: Mosquito Range to the east and the Sawatch Range to the west, and it is within approximately 10 miles of two of the highest peaks in the contiguous United States. To the northwest lies Mount Elbert, the highest of the fourteeners in the Sawatch Range and second highest peak in the contiguous United States. Neighboring Mount Massive is the third highest peak. Nearby Independence Pass, at 12,100 feet (3,687 m), is the highest paved crossing of the Continental Divide in the United States. The elevation, 9,012 ft (2,747 m), brings cool summers and cold winters to the area. Winter temperatures frequently drop to -25 and -30 (USDA zone 4).National Gardening Association Surrounded by moisture-robbing mountains, the climate is semiarid, though deep winter snows are common.
Early history
The Pike's Peak Gold Rush that began in 1859 brought an unprecedented number of people into the Colorado Territory. Among the earliest gold discoveries in Colorado were placer deposits near the headwaters of the Arkansas River in Oro city.Land of Contrast: A History of Southeast Colorado (Chapter 6) In 1860, Cache Creek, a mining camp near Granite, became the first settlement of note with a population of about 300, which, by the following year exploded to a population of 3,000. Following the discovery of gold in Low Pass Gulch in 1867, the town of Granite, located on either side of the Arkansas river, attracted many of the miners who previously inhabited the town of Cache Creek. The settlement included a three-mile stretch of river and one mining claim extended two-miles up Cache Creek. In 1867 free quartz gold was discovered and a mill was built. In 1868 the county seat was moved to Granite from the neighboring town of Dayton near present-day Twin Lakes, no longer in existence.Salida Colorado History - Chaffee County Colorado 125th Anniversary TimelineHistory of Nevada, Colorado, and ... - Google Books
1874 and 1875 brought the "Lake County War", a war involving a group of men from the nearby town of Nathrop known as "The Regulators", to Granite. The war reached its climax when members of the “Committee of Safety” killed Probate Judge Elias Dyer, the son of the well-known minister John Lewis Dyer, in his own courtroom. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/6025/junebio.htm The vigilante committee had been trying to rid the county of "lawbreakers" using illegal arrests, coerced confessions and forced exile as tools in its campaign. No one was ever convicted of Judge Dyer's murder. Murders were common, but convictions were not. More than one hundred homicides occurred during this period without a single conviction; it was almost impossible to get witnesses to swear to the killings.Colorado history - Buena Vista, Salida, Leadville The early prospectors included Horace Tabor, who later moved up the valley to Leadville where he was to find his fortune in the Colorado Silver Boom that swept Leadville in 1879. In a much-publicized scandal Tabor divorced his wife and married young and beautiful Elizabeth "Baby Doe" McCourt, twenty years his junior. The Tabors had two children, Lily and Silver Dollar. They lost their wealth when the price of silver dropped in 1893 and Tabor died in 1899 with a final request of Baby Doe that she maintain the claim to their silver mine. Baby Doe lived in squalid conditions in the tool shed of the mine for thirty years and was found dead in 1936.Colorado ghost towns-past and present - Google BooksThe Tabors: A Series | Colorado Central Magazine
Until 1879 the village of Granite was located in Lake County, once one of the two largest of the Colorado Territory’s original 17 counties. As the site of some of the richest placer gold strikes in Lake County, Granite held the position of county seat, but in 1878 they lost out to booming silver-rich Leadville, 17 miles to the north. However, Granite did manage to remain the county seat, but not of Lake County. They redrew the county lines creating Chaffee County, with Granite as the county seat. But a year later an election was held resulting in a win for Buena Vista, 17 miles to the south of Granite, with 1,128 votes out of a total population of 1,200 (when women couldn’t vote). Granite declared the election fraudulent and refused to give up its position, so late one night a group of men from Buena Vista took matters into their own hands.Granite, Colorado Buena Vistans voted to make their town the county seat, but Granite refused to give up the records. So a group of men led by Ernest Wilbur "borrowed" a locomotive and flat car and went up to Granite late on the night of November 12, 1880. The men built a siding to the Granite Courthouse and kicked in the door. Sheriff John Mear and his wife investigated the noise and were forced at gunpoint to watch the removal of all the county records by the Buena Vista men. Furniture was unbolted from the floor, including the railing. Even the heat stove, with embers remaining in it from the day's use, was loaded onto the flatcar. —Buena Vista Heritage Museum
Geology and mining
The upper Arkansas River valley, including the area around Granite, is hemmed in between high, sheer rock outcroppings of buff/pink-colored Precambrian granite.Colorado Geology Photojournal Granite lies at the center of the Colorado Mineral Belt (CMB), a 50 mile-wide strip that runs north and south for 300 miles. Mineralization of the CMB came primarily by way of intrusions of Tertiary Period magmas. The primary ores of the CMB were generally deposited as mixed metal sulfide mineral veins containing pyrite, galena, sphalerite, chalcopyrite, and gold, silver, and copper. During the last glacial period native gold was freed from the host rock and deposited along the ancient roaring Arkansas River bed - much larger than it is today due to the melting glacial runoff.
Unlike the early days of the California Gold Rush, very few large nuggets were ever found in the Colorado diggings. A gold pan was adequate for finding "pay dirt", but to produce more than a small amount of gold, sluice boxes were built to separate the gold dust from the gravel. They were built on site from the material that was at hand and placed in the river current. The old sluice boxes were lined with raised obstructions that were placed in a vertical position to the flow of the current and when the gold-laden gravel was shoveled into the upper end of the sluice, the flow of water carried the material down the length of the box. The gravel was carried down the entire length of the sluice and then discharged, but the heavier flakes of gold settled and became trapped. Signs of placer mining up and down along the Arkansas river near Granite and the surrounding areas are in evidence by the many heaps of glacially rounded granite boulders, rocks that were once buried in the glacial gravel deposits.www.historycolorado.org
Among the earliest gold discoveries in the Colorado gold rush were placer deposits discovered in 1859 at the headwaters of the Arkansas River near Granite. By late 1860 most of the streams had been prospected, and numerous gold placers were reported along the Arkansas River to Buena Vista and beyond. The deposits along the Arkansas River and Cache Creek near Granite probably were the most productive, producing about 49,000 troy ounces of gold.Colorado Earth Science: Cache Creek Park: A Chaffee County Gold RushChaffee County Colorado Gold Production
In many Colorado mining districts the easily discovered and worked placers were the first big strikes of a typical gold rush. But the free gold supply in stream beds quickly became depleted, and the initial phase was followed by prospecting for veins of lode gold that were the original source of the placer gold. The hills above Granite are pockmarked with numerous old mining tunnels from hard rock mining, evidence of the typical second stage of a gold rush cycle. Their neighbors in Leadville went on to discover silver, resulting in a silver rush, but Granite never got that far. In just a few years their ore began to play out, and the town's population, once as high as 7000, began to decline.
Stagecoach and railways
Leadville Stagecoach Road
The earliest mode of transportation used by the growing number of settlers in Granite and the surrounding area was horseback and pack mules or burros. The Santa Fe Trail, built in 1822, had a north fork up to Denver (founded in 1858), and by 1877 the Leadville Stagecoach Road was running from Canyon City, through Granite, Leadville,colorado stagecoach canon city to leadville - Google zoeken and north to Denver. Reliable transportation was important to deliver supplies for the growing communities, and the route was used more as a supply and mail route than for transportation of passengers. An old schedule from 1880 with the stage stops from Canyon City to Leadville shows that the trip was 126 miles and took 26 (jarring) hours. The distance today is 120 miles, illustrating the fact that in these high mountains the routes for passage are very limited. However, with modern-day transportation the trip now takes only about two hours. The distance to Granite was 108 miles and the fare was $13.50 The Canyon City to Leadville stage ran three times daily.
Traces of the old stage road are still visible, as are the remains of bridges that once crossed the Arkansas River north of Buena Vista near the Colorado Midland Railway tunnels, from east to west at Pine Creek (called "La Plata" in the photo at right), and a final crossing to the east side of the Arkansas just north of Clear Creek, about a mile south of Granite. At low water levels log supports of the rubble-filled abutments can still be seen at the Clear Creek crossing. The photo at right was taken as part of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, the first extensive geological survey of the West. La Plata creek, presently known as Pine Creek, is known to rafters as a dangerous rapids that have taken several lives.
The stage road was built ten to fifteen years before the railroads, and it is likely the heavily engineered rail routes overwhelmed the hand-built stage road. It is uncertain as to whether or not the stage road was abandoned as soon as the railroads reached Leadville, or if the route continued to be used by freight wagons and even early motor cars until better routes were available on the west side of the river where Highway 24 now runs. The stretch of old stage road that runs through Granite is surprisingly well-preserved and is used as a hiking/cycling trail.
Denver & Rio Grande Western