Summerville Colorado Townsite - Ghost town
Photos courtesy of Mike Sinnwell 2005
Summerville still has the old hotel / boarding house. It is on private property but easily visible from the road. There are some of the old buildings still standing. Some have been converted to summer homes.
A viewer writes - Monday April 4th 20011 - Thank you for documenting the town of Summerville. All the buildings burned in the Sept. 2010 Four Mile Canyon fire.
A viewer comments - Thankfully this is not true. Only two of the Summerville homes were lost in the fire, "The Big House" (old boarding house) where my great grandmother Elsie lived and "The Hunt House" first cabin in town which was not photographed. Heartbreaking as it is the photos you took in 2006 are a wonderful keepsake of a time gone by. Thank you So Much
Rocky writes - Yes and I went back into this area in 2010 after the fire. Sad to see so many buildings gone forever. I was fortunate to get my photos when I did. I just could not take pictures of the devastation I saw after the fire.
A viewer writes - Thursday April 14th 2011 -- Thank YOU sir, for the obvious effort you've put into your site. It's beautiful. No, I wasn't personally affected by the fire as I now live in Michigan. I did live in Summerville in the late 70's. Also have lived in the four mile canyon a couple miles above Wallstreet, Gold Hill, Left Hand Canyon below Ward, and south of Nederland a bit. I spent a lot of time exploring mine sites and such and really miss it. Your pictures bring back a lot of happy memories.
Tom Trask owned pretty much all of Summerville and lived in the house you identified as the old hotel until the fire. When I lived there, his grandmother was still alive at 102. She moved to the area during the gold rush and never left. She was full of great stories about the mining days, told us about a shooting she witnessed in the miner's rest another friend lived in. Not sure if that cabin survived, would love to know. It still had the bunkrooms down the side with 6 built-in bunks each. Lots of great history in those Colorado hills. Thanks again for a great site! -- Jim
A viewer writes – April 27th, 2018 -- An obscure folk musician, KAREN DALTON, and her husband, Richard Tucker lived in Summerville for a few years in the 60s. Sadly, Karen, who was a fine musician and singer, never achieved commercial success and died in 1993. Her beautiful music has in the past decade or so seen a rediscovery. The following is a quote from her ex-husband Richard Tucker about their time in Summerville. “I think often of the life Karen and I had in Colorado – it was certainly the best period of our relationship and particularly of living in Summerville… (It) was an old gold mining town and all the old cabins were owned and rented out by an old mountain couple. They lived and looked just like in a western movie. Henry taught me everything there was to know about splitting wood. The house had cold running water, a gas cook stove, a wood and coal stove for heat, and an outhouse. Sitting in the outhouse you had a great view right to the top of Bighorn Mountain. One night I burned the outhouse down. There was a hot coal in the ashes I dumped in the outhouse to “sweeten” it. “We bought two horses and a pony and fenced in an area to keep them in. Karen really knew horses and one of the ones she picked to buy turned out to be the fastest quarter horse in those parts…”
MIKE C