Hamilton
By the mid-nineteenth century, the California Gold Rush brought a wave of miners from across the globe to seek their fortunes. In the late 1850s, many ventured to Colorado and made their way northwest along Tarryall Creek into the area known today as Park County. In 1859, a party of seven, including Earl Hamilton and William Holman, set upon South Park in the hopes of bountiful discovery.[1] There, they found placer beds brimming with gold and between 1859 and 1860 founded the two competing towns of Hamilton and Tarryall.[2]
Hamilton “became one of the most populous and attractive mining camps in the country.”[3] During the 1860s, as many as twenty thousand miners had their names listed in the records of the post office located at Hamilton.[4] During the 1870s, however, Hamilton’s population and prominence began to decline, and by 1877, there were only one hundred residents living there.[5] Hamilton shifted to becoming a mainstay for the people of Chinese descent living in South Park.
In the early 1870s, miners from China, like many other immigrants, ventured to Park County.[6] They first attempted to stake a claim in Tarryall since it was known to be the richest source of placer gold in the region. Although miners of nearly every nationality were mining there, they shunned and excluded any miner from China that attempted to enter the camp.[7] In 1878, dozens of laborers from China were hired to work in the placer mines two miles north of Hamilton.[8] They were supervised by a head man called Ah Moon who was an associate of the labor contractor Edward L. Thayer.[9] Just as many miners from China took over previously worked mining claims, they also were able to start a community out of Hamilton’s remains and transform it once again into a thriving town.[10] A Chinatown was created, and people from China occupied the log cabins deserted by the original white tenants. Once the area’s placer mines were no longer productive, many residents traveled daily from Hamilton to the coal mines in Como and King.[11]
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[1] Virginia McConnell Simmons, Bayou Salado: the Story of South Park (Colorado Springs, CO: Century One Press, 1982), 63.
[2] Earl Hamilton established the town of Hamilton while William Holman established Tarryall; Simmons, 63; Mary Dyer, Echoes of Como, Colorado, 1879-1988 (George Meyer, 1988), 94; Gerald E. Rudolph, “The Chinese in Colorado, 1869-1911” (dissertation, 1964), 63; Frank Hall, “Park County,” in History of the State Of Colorado, vol. 4 (Chicago, IL: The Blakely Printing Company, 1895), pp. 258-268, 259.
[3] Hall, 259.
[4] Simmons, 71-72.
[5] Simmons, 161-162.
[6] Alice E Wonder, “Chinatown, at Fairplay, as It Was in Early Days,” Park County Republican and Fairplay Flume, 1956, Summer Tourist edition.
[7] Wonder, “Chinatown, at Fairplay."
[8] Simmons, 162; Frank Fossett, Colorado, Its Gold and Silver Mines, Farms and Stock Ranges, and Health and Pleasure Resorts Tourist's Guide to the Rocky Mountains (Glorieta, NM: Rio Grande Press, Inc., 1976), 507; Rudolph, 49; Thomas B. Corbett, The Colorado Directory of Mines Containing a Description of the Mines and Mills, and the Mining and Milling Corporations of Colorado, Arranged Alphabetically by Counties, and a History of Colorado from Its Early Settlement to the Present Time, 1st ed. (Denver, CO: Rocky Mountain News Print Co., 1879), 327.
[9] Rudolph, 64-65.
[10] Simmons, 162.
[11] R Laurie Simmons and Thomas H Simmons, “Historic Cemetery Development in Park County, Colorado, 1859-1965,” in National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form (2016), E22, https://www.historycolorado.org/sites/default/files/media/document/2021/co_park_county_parkcountycoloradohistoriccemeteriesmpdf.pdf; Rudolph, 72.