Summit County is littered with ghost towns, where miners would set up camp for a year or two, and then leave with little trace – except for a post office.
“We never knew a town existed, but yet, here it showed up as having a post office,” says local historian Bill Fountain, author of the “Historic Landscapes” series.
Fountain has been researching local history for 36 years. Post office records were the clues he needed to track down at least a half-dozen ghost towns: Bloomfield, Silver Lake, Quandary City and one of his favorites, Delaware City, located near what today is Breckenridge Golf Club.
“One of the many, mamy places I have spent hundreds of hours, literally, is the Denver Public Library,” Fountain tells Krystal 93 news director Phil Lindeman. “They have a special area where you have to wear white gloves when you go through manuscripts.”
Fountain was scouring the white glove room when he, like the miners before him, hit the motherlode: A handwritten list of the first post offices in Summit County.
“I paid to have those copied, digitized them, and kept those in my files, so when I started writing this book, I went to those files for the post offices,” he says. “That’s where I found Silver Lake and Delaware City.”
Many of the towns on this list never appear on early, hand-drawn maps of Summit County. They were lost in time, except for a post office.
Fountain believes there are two reasons post offices were critical for mining towns of all sizes.
“They wanted to try to get a post office because the men laying the town out knew that would make their lots more valuable,” Fountain says. “The miners also needed some place to get their mail and send their mail, and so these post offices would pop up throughout what would become Summit County.”
Just because a town was lost in time doesn’t mean it was small. Fountain points to Delaware City, there by the golf course.
“It was a substantial town in 1861 and even had a theater where plays were conducted several times a week for the miners,” he says.
Today, many of Fountain’s ghost towns are little more than faint traces in the rock – and the ink on a handwritten list.
Find Fountain’s series, “Historic Landscapes,” with co-author Sandra Mather, through Summit Historical Society.