Travel to Aspen - Colorado - USA - History

Aspen - Colorado - History

The city, seat of Pitkin County, west central Colorado, U.S., is situated on the Roaring Fork River at the eastern edge of the White River National Forest.

Affluent, cosmopolitan Aspen is now noted for its Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and Aspen Music School. Its summer music festival was the progenitor (1949) of similar arts festivals throughout the mountain states.

Archaeologists recently discovered that ancient people made their homes in the mountains near Aspen, Colorado 8,000 years ago. The first residents were the Ute Indians, who called the area the Shining Mountains. Silver prospectors founded the city in the spring of 1879 and called it Ute City after the Indians. In the summer of 1880 the town, which had grown to 300 residents, was renamed Aspen for the local stands of aspen trees.

Thousands of fortune seekers had arrived in Aspen to stake their claims or work in the silver mines. During the 1880's-90's boom Aspen boasted 12,000 residents, newspapers, schools, banks, churches, a modern hospital, and an opera house. Aspen quickly became an urban, industrialized community with impressive architecture, leaving Independence, Ashcroft, Ruby and other camps to become ghost towns. All of Aspens' significant buildings and Victorian residences, many of which still stand, were built over this short ten-year period. Among the many beautiful examples of Aspen's Victorian elegance that are still in use today is the Wheeler Opera House.

The city’s importance declined rapidly after silver prices collapsed in the early 1893 and the government returned to the gold standard. Ironically, one of the largest nuggets of native silver ever found was mined in 1894 in Aspen. With minimal commercial silver markets, Aspen survived as a rural county seat and ranching centre as mining declined.

Just 700 people called Aspen home in 1935, when international outdoorsmen came to the Roaring Fork Valley in search of the ideal location for a ski resort. They hired the famous Swiss avalanche expert André Roch to develop a ski area based in the ghost town of Ashcroft, but had to cancel their plans with the outbreak of World War II. Meanwhile, André Roch and the enthusiastic Aspen Ski Club cut a race course on Aspen Mountain, served by a “Boat Tow”— two massive sleds pulled up the hill by an old mine hoist and a gas motor. The result: in 1947 Aspen Mountain opened with the world’s longest ski lift.

Click To Go Back

Back to America

Back to WTG