Last Sunday, I got to go to one of my favorite places in the world – the ghost town of Dillon and the Ferris-Haggarty Mine. If you’ve looked at the pictures in my gallery on this website, or if you’ve read Mountain Time and/or Peaks and Valleys (which I hope you have!), then you know that this is a very special place to me. In older blogs, I’ve described how in the many, many times I’ve been up there, I can almost feel the people who lived there around me. This isn’t a supernatural-ghost thing, it is just that my imagination lets me jump from today to the early 1900s. Since I began to research the mine and the town of Dillon and learned the names of people who settled and worked there, I have felt as if I somehow know them. Ed Haggarty, Robert Deal, George Ferris and J.M Rumsey are the men who staked the mine initially. Other people joined the effort – Willis George Emerson, Jack Fulkerson, Malachi Dillon. I can go on for a long list. The point is that for a great number of years, these names haven’t been just historical people to me, they have been friends – sort of – definitely people who are important.
So – getting back to our trip to the mine last weekend. Karl and I got to go to the mine as part of the Grand Encampment Museum’s 50th anniversary celebration. Along on the tour were many important people, but two groups were really special to me. I was privileged to spend time and look at the mine and the area through new eyes as I accompanied descendants of George Ferris and Robert Deal on the trip. The Deal descendants have also been up to the mine and in the area many times. It was fun to hear LuDel’s stories and to have some of my misinformation corrected. Ironically though, the Ferris family was unaware of their connection to ‘my’ George Ferris, and they were unaware of their connection to the mine until quite recently. That made it really amazing to have the honor of sharing the area with them for their first time. In some ways, George Ferris has been part of ‘my family’ longer than he has been part of theirs, and it was a joy to be part of their discovery.
In processing that trip over this past week, I have come to understand how important history is. If you drive up to the Ferris Haggarty mine today, you’ll see very little. Buildings aren’t standing and while there is a sealed entrance to the mine, it doesn’t look like much and certainly doesn’t hint at the wealth of ore still hidden beneath the rock or the magnitude of courage and hard work that the mine and the tramway demanded of its men over a hundred years ago. If you drive through Dillon, you see a few log cabin foundations and an impression that once was the basement of the Dillon Hotel. It would be really easy to drive right past it and not even understand that a booming town was here. If the museum hadn’t been started 50 years ago by two women, Vera Oldman and Hila Parkison, then maybe our collective memories of the place and time would be gone. How poor we would be if that had happened. I’d certainly be poorer. I’ve had the joy of getting to know the people who built and populated the area for many years and now I have a new and living set of friends as a result as well! How cool is that?
Bill, Jim, and Sean Ferris along with former Museum Director Judy Stepp and me.
Descendants of Robert Deal in front of the mine entrance.
