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The town of Victor, Colorado, established in 1894, is largely boarded up now. After a fire burned it to the ground in 1899 (as nearly every mining town in the Rockies was razed at some point in their lives), the brick buildings erected from the ashes have stood the test of time. 

The Victor town mural below reads: "For many who came West, their biggest dream was to find gold. With small grubstakes they came, over 12,000 of them, making Victor the fifth largest city in Colorado by 1900. The glory days brought entertainment as well. Jack Dempsey trained at the fire station and Soapy Smith promoted bull fights at Gillette. Victor was also the boyhood home for Lowell Thomas, international radio and TV commentator. At its peak Victor had three trains, two trolleys, 20 doctors, six churches, 12 labor unions, 15 attorneys and 48 saloons. Victor burned to the ground in August of 1899 and was rebuilt "overnight" with the brick seen today. Gold was discovered by Bob Womack near Cripple Creek in 1890. Through the years over 500 mines have employed more than 6,000 miners. The Cresson Mine produced 60,000 ounces of gold from a room-sized crystalline "vug" [cavity inside rock] located 1,200 feet below the surface. The Portland Mine was 3,500 feet deep.And the American Eagle was one of the highest at 10,750 feet. The legendary Independence Mine was sold by W.S. Stratton in 1899 for $3,000,000. The district has produced over 22 million ounces of gold." The bicycle obscures the rest of the text, but you get the idea -- once a major mining town. 

There are actually a lot of fun murals around town.

We were walking beside this one at night and ran into a local who told us how much he loves having this mural. A columbine and a mountain lion. The eyes seem to follow you as you walk.

Nikola Tesla on the left. You can stay in the Nikola Tesla room in the Black Monarch hotel, a boutique hotel with themed rooms. Why Tesla of all people? In 1899, he built a laboratory in Colorado Springs to conduct high-voltage experiments and study wireless power transmission. People say that he wired the original hotel for electricity in 1899, but there does not appear to be any actual documentation to support this. Whatever. It's a fun totally random thing to run across! 

We stayed at the historic Victor Hotel just down the block on both of our trips here. I don't seem to have taken any photos of it, but the coolest thing in that hotel is the old elevator. (And why have we come to Victor twice? To participate in the Rocky Mountain Rambler 500. As Team Killer Rabbit, "Pinzy," our Pinzgauer, is our official entry but last year we had to bring our more cushy 4Runner, Chewie, as I'd just had shoulder-repair shoulder.) 

A lot of old buildings stand unused and deteriorating. I like the 1/2 number in the address, I'm not used to seeing that. I'm glad they're not just crumbling into rubbish piles, but it is sad to see so much potential not being realized with these lovely buildings.

There are a few shops opened in some of the old buildings for tourists, and a little grocery store. A couple restaurants. We stepped into an artist co-op gallery with some interesting work and had a nice conversation with the artist on retail duty that day. Another store we stepped into was an antique store where they also make traditional brooms. (random!) They had a great collection of old bottles and these old crates. We always enjoy looking at the labels on these things.  

Here's a list of the labels I could make out in this stack, above. I find them to be a very interesting look into the lives of people in an 1890s mining town:  DuPont Explosive Gelex No. 2; Atlas something Accordion some kind of parts; Searchlight Mining Candles; Victor Box Works; Seasons Greetings; Animal Yeast; American Institute Chicago; Sapolio [cleaning product] Morgan's Sons; School Chalk; Crystal White Family Soap; KC Baking Power - "Same price today as 45 years ago 25 ounces for 25 [? dollars? cents? donkeys?]"; Lenox Soap - "lathers freely in hard water"; Grinding Compounds; Sears Roebuck crackers, biscuits, cakes; Peruna The Great Tonic -- the drug was reportedly so popular that babies were named after it, When Prohibition came into effect, Americans began to drink large amounts of Peruna and other similar products as a way to get intoxicated. a kind of snake oil; Corn Starch; Giant Boosters; Penetrating Beta-Dioxin Re-Concentrated Embalming Fluid; Number 5 Diamond Brand Matches; Nails , Solder, Sterilized Tack (different companies and boxes); Chloride of Lime [i.e. basically bleach]; W.C. Nevin Candy Co of Denver; Carpenter's Chalk.

We couldn't resist buying this little old bottle for our collection, with the giraffe neck -- for cough syrup. 

Nicely kept-up City Hall.

We're kind of museum nerds and we enjoy all types of museums and period houses. We've been to numerous mining museums around Colorado. Although there is a lot of crossover in the types of displays and artifacts from the Colorado mining towns, they each end up having unique and unexpected things that always make the admission price worth it. So naturally we popped into the Lowell Thomas Victor Museum. Here is an interesting old relic from an old casino -- a penny slot that doesn't give back money for winning poker hands, rather, cigars. 

The really unexpected room in the middle of all these mining artifacts and mine history, and rooms of Victorian furniture and clothing and domestic gadgets, was the Lowell Thomas room. Silly us, we didn't know who Lowell Thomas was! With his name on the museum, I figured he was just the major patron of the museum, financing it or something. Some of you are probably laughing now at our ignorance, and the rest are waiting for me to tell you who he is. This room seemed so utterly out of place showing black-and-white photos of this guy around the world with wild African animals and indigenous tribesmen. What did this have to do with a gritty mining town? So then we learned Lowell Thomas, who went on to fame as a journalist and world traveler, was born and raised here in Victor. Worked in the mines as a kid. 

Well I became so interested in this guy who seemed to have lived the life I dream of, that I promptly went and bought his biography by Mitchell Stephens, "The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism." The biographer makes no attempt to whitewash Thomas's early tactics to get ahead (he was pretty much the poster child for "fake it 'til you make it"). And in the end he did "make it," so the tactic worked. Just goes to show you can come from anywhere and end up everywhere.   

There is also a fire truck and machinery kind of museum. The first year we went to it, they were serving home-made ice cream -- the old crank and paddle style -- and the second year there was a guy showing visitors everything they could want to know about how the machines worked, and he basically just gave demonstrations all day long.

So this is by no means a comprehensive guide to Victor, but should you find yourself there, these were some of our favorite things. 

We popped over briefly to the more well-known town of Cripple Creek. It's larger and more well-known today primarily because it legalized gambling and is a casino destination. But in their heydays, Victor was the larger of the two towns. We went mostly in search of the cemetery, but also followed our nerd nose to the museum. The Cripple Creek District Museum was quite a nice museum, with several outbuildings you can walk to along a path showcasing period furnishings of the assay office, and two miner's cabins including the cabin the renowned prostitute, French Blanche, lived in. So I guess technically, that is not a miner's cabin haha. The gift shop is reputedly the oldest wooden commercial structure in Cripple Creek and survived the fires of 1896. 

It's housed in an old train station, The Midway Terminal Railway Depot. Here is the scale they used to weigh luggage.

To make it more fun, we did the scavenger hunt -- you get a piece of paper with questions to find the answers to throughout the museum, and then you enter your responses into a big box from which a winner who has found all the right answers is drawn, and the prize is a big nugget of gold. Sadly, we did not win but we had a fun time looking for the answers in the various displays. This was not part of the scavenger hunt but I thought it was cool, below. The docent working that day was super helpful answering any questions we had and pointing out tidbits of interest. This looks like quite the formidable cash register! I remember one of my favorite toys as a kid was a little cash register, probably like a tenth of this size. Not being familiar with antique cash registers, I wondered what the letters on the left were about. Do you know?

So each one corresponds to a drawer with the same letter. Each employee had a different letter assigned for their drawer and it unlocked only their drawer when they pushed it to complete a transaction, allowing managers to track sales, assign responsibility, and balance cash at the end of a shift. I only ever worked one retail job but I remember so clearly sitting in the back room with an adding machine balancing my shift. 

 Cripple Creek also had a nice central, kind of a picnic area, with very nice wall murals. These are good images for you to right-click on and open in a new tab to view all the details. 

Lastly, here's an old photo of the main drag in Victor from back in the day, 1895. 

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