The story of Gilman, Colorado, reads like a horror movie. The setting: a small Rocky Mountain town in 1984. The characters: the residents of a centuries-old mining community. The plot: the soil is contaminated with deadly toxins, and authorities flood the town, urging people to evacuate. Locals leave with whatever they can, and as they drive away, look longingly at the rows of ranch homes they’ve left behind. Silent roads are stippled with empty buildings. Above them, at the top of a dirt hill, looms a massive processing plant, a grim symbol of the district’s environmental collapse.
Like St. Elmo, one of the American West’s best-preserved ghost towns, this place casts a haunting spell. The real history of Gilman was a bit less dramatic, but it ended the same way. The town was founded in 1886, and workers moved to the area to mine zinc, copper, silver, and gold. Over the next century, they would extract 10 million tons of material. Production started to decline in the 1960s, and by the time the Environmental Protection Agency arrived in the mid-80s, mine runoff had tarnished Gilman’s groundwater. The landscape was so deadly that residents were ordered to leave, and the town’s collapse has since served as a cautionary tale about unregulated industry.
The remains of Gilman still hug the steep slopes of Battle Mountain. Its ruins now stand on private property, which is off-limits to visitors. But you can still stop and see Gilman from the shoulder of Highway 24, which runs parallel to the site. There’s a broad gravel area to park on, which overlooks a building-studded valley. Stopping there is free, and it’s the only legal way to see Gilman’s remains. Bring binoculars, or better yet, a telephoto lens.
What Gilman, Colorado, looks like today
Gilman is hardly alone when it comes to abandoned Colorado towns. Seven hundred ghost towns were scattered across the state as of 2018, representing a wide range of industries and eras. Intrepid explorers have made their way into Gilman, photographing and filming the town’s crumbling remains. What’s so unsettling about these images is how contemporary they all look. The buildings aren’t frontier shacks, but split-level homes you could find in modern-day suburbs…