Crystal Mill

Interesting facts

The mill was built in 1893, the year of the silver panic, when mines across the country were closing but Crystal still kept several working.

The compressed-air system worked so well that a stamp mill was soon added to crush and concentrate silver ore before shipping.

Ore left the valley on jack trains, strings of up to a hundred mules, because the roads never became more than narrow wagon trails.

At its peak in the mid-1880s Crystal had more than 500 residents, a newspaper, the Crystal River Current, a pool hall and an exclusive men's club.

By 1915 the camp's population had fallen to just eight people.

The silver deposits that started it all were found in 1874 by the geologist Sylvester Richardson near the forks of the Crystal River.

Early miners set fire to thousands of acres of old-growth forest to clear the ground, changing the vegetation of the valley.

The ruined powerhouse is regarded as one of the most photographed historic sites in Colorado.

Why it is worth it

Perched on a rock outcrop above the Crystal River, with water spilling from beneath its weathered timber walls, the Crystal Mill is a lone survivor of a silver-mining boom in the Elk Mountains of Colorado. Despite its name and its look, it was never a grain mill: it was a powerhouse, in which the river drove a water turbine connected to an air compressor, and the compressed air was piped to nearby mines to run drills and other machinery.

It was built in 1893 by George C. Eaton and B. S. Phillips, promoters of the Sheep Mountain Tunnel and Mining Company, to power the Sheep Mountain Tunnel. In its working years it was called the Sheep Mountain Power House, or the Lost Horse Mill after the mining claim it stands on; the word "mill" comes from a small three-stamp ore-crushing mill that stood in a separate building immediately to the south and has not survived. The plant originally ran on a horizontal wheel. It was abandoned in 1917 when the Sheep Mountain Tunnel mine shut down, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

The mill sits at Crystal, a mining camp founded in 1880-81 near the meeting of the North and South Forks of the Crystal River, at about 2,730 metres above sea level. The camp produced silver, lead and zinc, but its remoteness made hauling ore out a constant struggle: the nearest railheads were in Crested Butte and Carbondale, reached only by narrow wagon trails. Crystal was in decline by 1889 and nearly empty by 1917. A handful of cabins still stand, occupied only in summer, and the valley lies between the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness to the north and the Raggeds Wilderness to the south.

Six miles downstream is the small town of Marble, incorporated in 1899 and named for the Yule Marble quarry above it, the source of the stone for the Tomb of the Unknowns and parts of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

Getting there

Crystal lies about 6 miles (10 km) east of Marble, reached by Gunnison County Road 3, a rocky shelf road suited only to four-wheel-drive vehicles; Marble connects by paved road to State Highway 133 and Carbondale. The nearest larger city is Montrose, about 93 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Aspen-Pitkin County Airport (ASE), about 27 km away in a straight line across the Elk Mountains; by road it is reached via Carbondale.

From the encyclopaedia

The Crystal Mill, or the Old Mill is an 1892 wooden powerhouse located on an outcrop above the Crystal River in Crystal, Colorado, United States. It is accessible from Marble, Colorado via four-wheel drive. Although called a Watermill, it is more correctly denoted as a compressor station, which used a water turbine to drive an air compressor, and was originally built with a horizontal wheel. The compressed air was then used to power other machinery or tools.

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Crystal Mill

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