Central City has used the moniker of the 'Richest Square Mile on Earth' since I was a child.
"In May 1859, the United States was definitely ready for another gold rush.
The excitement of the previous decade’s California rush was over. A prolonged drought had ruined numerous farmers, and the financial Panic of 1857 had taken its toll in the form of economic depression and widespread unemployment. And everyone was worried about an impending Civil War.So making a fresh start by seeking one’s fortune in the “Kansas gold fields,” a region that encompassed much of what is now Colorado, seemed like the answer to a prayer for many of those who were struggling.
No matter that reports trickling back to eastern cities were beginning to label the “Pikes Peak or Bust” gold rush mostly bust. Hopeful prospectors still kept on coming.
One was Alabama native John H. Gregory, a mule skinner who had caught gold fever in the Georgia goldfields. Arriving in Cherry Creek near what is now Denver in spring 1859, Gregory unsuccessfully panned creeks around Denver City before panning his way several miles up the north fork of Clear Creek. On May 6, 1859, he was following a trail of “color,” particles of gold found in the bottom of a gold pan, when he discovered a weathered, heavily stained outcrop of crumbling, oxidized quartz at a site that would soon be dubbed Gregory Diggings.
Filling his pan with fractured quartz that he didn’t even bother to crush first, Gregory quickly washed out one-quarter of an ounce of gold, then worth more than $4.
By June, every inch of the 3-mile-long gulch that Gregory named after himself had been claimed —and the Pikes Peak gold rush was on again, only this time in earnest.
By the end of 1859, an estimated 100,000 people had flocked to Colorado Territory. And in just two years, they would recover some 325,000 ounces of gold, then valued at more than $5.4 million.A plaque set into a stone monument on Colorado 279 between Central City and neighboring Black Hawk commemorates Gregory’s discovery. And the remains of the outcrop itself are visible on the highway’s opposite side.
While Gregory Diggings, which gave Central City the title of “the richest square mile on Earth,” eventually yielded almost 1 million ounces of gold, Gilpin County (of which Central City is the county seat) went on to produce 4.5 million ounces of gold between 1859 and the late 1930s. At today’s record-high prices, this gold would be worth a little more than $5.8 billion. Yes, billion.
Not bad for a rush that The New York Times initially described as generating nothing but “much disappointment, suffering and repentance.”" — Lynda La Rocca (from (
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