Gilman, Colorado

Gilman sits at roughly 9,000 feet on a shelf of rock that miners of the 1880s considered inconveniently vertical and impossibly rich. The Gilman post office opened November 3, 1886, and the town grew on silver, then pivoted to lead and zinc as the 20th century wore on. What makes Gilman distinct among Colorado ghost towns is not the usual story of exhausted veins and drifting population — it is the abrupt eviction that sealed the town in the 1980s and the Superfund designation that followed.

01A Silver Boom Town on a Cliff

Gilman grew out of the Colorado Silver Boom that reshaped the state in the 1880s. John Clinton, a prospector and judge based in nearby Red Cliff, developed the early mining operations and helped plat the townsite in 1886. The location was improbable: a narrow bench carved into Battle Mountain, hundreds of feet above the Eagle River, with workers and supplies hauled up the cliff face.

By 1899 the town reportedly held around 300 residents, clustered in a tight grid of frame houses, a school, a company store, and the shafts and mills that defined daily life. Silver paid the wages in the early years, and when silver prices collapsed after 1893, Gilman did what most Colorado silver camps could not — it survived, because the ore body underneath held more than silver.

02From Silver to Zinc: The Eagle Mine Era

After 1905, the mines transitioned toward lead and zinc, the metals that would carry Gilman through most of the 20th century. The complex consolidated around the Eagle Mine, which became one of the largest zinc producers in the United States. EPA documentation and Wikipedia estimate that the underground network eventually stretched roughly 70 miles of tunnels and produced more than 12 million tons of ore across its working life.

The New Jersey Zinc Company and, later, Gulf and Western Industries operated the mines and effectively owned the town. Houses were company houses. The water system, the store, and the social clubs all ran on company time. Accounts from former residents describe a tight, isolated community — families stacked above a working mill, children walking to school past ore cars, the whole place humming with the rhythm of three shifts underground.

03Why Was Gilman Abandoned?

The closure, when it came, was sudden and ordered from Washington rather than driven by market forces alone. By the early 1980s the Eagle Mine was losing money, and decades of tailings and mine drainage had fouled the Eagle River and the groundwater beneath the townsite. In 1984 the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Gilman evacuated. Residents had weeks to leave. The post office finally closed April 22, 1986, the same year the EPA placed a 235-acre area containing roughly 8 million tons of mine waste on the National Priorities List as the Eagle Mine Superfund site.

Cleanup began in 1988. Crews relocated waste piles, capped the main tailings impoundment, and treated mine drainage. The EPA concluded in 2000 that the site had been substantially remediated, though water treatment continues. The town itself was left largely in place — a sealed, contaminated time capsule rather than a demolition project.

04Can You Visit Gilman Today?

No — not legally. Gilman sits on private property, most recently under the ownership of developers who have floated, and abandoned, multiple redevelopment plans. In 2007 the Ginn Company proposed a private ski resort and luxury community across Battle Mountain that would have included the old townsite. Minturn voters approved the annexation of 4,300 acres in a 2008 referendum with 87 percent in favor, but by September 2009 Ginn had pulled out; Crave Real Estate Ventures took over operations. As of the most recent reporting, nothing has been built.

Trespassers are prosecuted. The site is visible from U.S. Highway 24 between Minturn and Red Cliff, where travelers can pull off at marked viewpoints and look across the canyon to the rows of empty houses clinging to the cliff. Drone flights are discouraged, and the surrounding land remains part of the active Superfund monitoring area.

05What Remains of Gilman Today

Seen from the highway, Gilman looks nearly intact. Rows of white-painted company houses line the bench in orderly streets. The headframes, the mill, the shuttered school, and the old store still stand, weather-worn but upright, because no one has been allowed to salvage them. Interior photographs published by urban explorers and local journalists over the years show furniture, appliances, school supplies, and company records left behind in the 1984 evacuation, slowly collapsing under snow loads and time.

Below the town, the Eagle River runs cleaner than it did a generation ago, and the capped tailings slope is revegetated. The mine tunnels remain flooded. Gilman is not a town that was gradually forgotten; it is a town that was closed, and that distinction is visible in every boarded window on Battle Mountain.