It Made a Sixth of America's Silver. Then It Almost Died.

In 1894 a crew at the Smuggler Mine, on the hillside you can see from almost anywhere in town, brought out a single piece of silver weighing 2,350 pounds. More than a tonne. It had to be broken apart to get it out of the shaft. It remains the largest silver nugget ever mined anywhere.

By the time they pulled it out, the boom that made it possible was already over. That is the shape of Aspen's whole history, and it explains more about the town today than any amount of talk about celebrities.

Ute City, 1879

Prospectors crossed over from Leadville in 1879 and a man named Henry B. Gillespie laid out a town he called Ute City. It was renamed Aspen the following year, after the trees. For its first few winters it was a cluster of tents and cabins at 8,000 feet with no road good enough to get ore out economically.

What changed everything was rail. The Denver & Rio Grande arrived in November 1887 and the Colorado Midland followed in February 1888. The moment heavy ore could leave the valley cheaply, Aspen stopped being a camp and became a city — in a matter of months.

The richest silver district in America

What followed was one of the great short booms of the American west. By the early 1890s Aspen was producing something close to a sixth of all the silver mined in the United States, and in 1891 it overtook Leadville as the country's most productive silver district.

The money went straight into buildings, which is the part that still matters. Jerome B. Wheeler, a Macy's partner who had come west, put up the Wheeler Opera House in 1888 and the Hotel Jerome in November 1889 — electric light, a hydraulic lift, a dining room meant to be worthy of a real city. Both are still standing on the same corners. You can have dinner in one tonight.

1893: the year it stopped

In 1893 Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. The federal government stopped buying silver, the price fell through the floor, and within months the mines that had justified two railroads were not worth working.

There was no second industry. People left. The ones who stayed went into ranching, which a high mountain valley supports but does not enrich. The town did not die outright — it just stopped. By 1930 the whole of Pitkin County held about 1,770 people, and the town itself was down to a few hundred.

The Quiet Years

That is what the half century from the 1890s to the 1940s is called locally, and it is the most important stretch in Aspen's history precisely because nothing happened in it.

The detail that tells you everything: in the worst winters, families moved into the Hotel Jerome — the grand hotel, the one with the hydraulic lift — because it was cheaper to live there than to heat their own houses. A building put up to impress silver barons became, for a while, a way for ordinary people to get through February.

Nobody tore anything down, because nobody had the money to build anything in its place.

So the 1880s street grid survived. The brick commercial blocks survived. The Victorian houses on the West End survived, shabby and intact. When Vail, Snowmass, Beaver Creek and a dozen others were designed decades later, they had to invent a historic centre out of nothing. Aspen never lost the one it had. Fifty years of failure turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to it.

Skis, and then an idea

The first attempt at a ski business was the Highland Bavarian Lodge on Castle Creek, which opened in December 1936. The war interrupted it, but the war also delivered the thing Aspen actually needed: soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division trained to ski at Camp Hale, an hour away, and some of them came back afterwards meaning to stay.

One was Friedl Pfeifer. In 1945 he met Walter Paepcke, a Chicago industrialist whose wife Elizabeth had seen the town before the war and never got over it.

Here is where Aspen separates from every other ski town in America. Paepcke was not primarily interested in skiing. His idea — it became known as the Aspen Idea — was a place where a person could exercise mind, body and spirit in the same week. Skiing was to be one leg of three. He brought in the designer Herbert Bayer, out of the Bauhaus, to shape how the whole thing looked.

The Aspen Skiing Corporation was formed in 1946. Then, in 1949, Paepcke staged something genuinely strange: a convocation marking the two hundredth birthday of Goethe, in a tent designed by Eero Saarinen, in a Colorado town with a few hundred residents and one paved street. Albert Schweitzer came to lecture. It was his only visit to the United States.

Out of that fortnight came the Aspen Institute, the Aspen Music Festival and, later, the Aspen Center for Physics. In 1950 the town hosted the FIS World Alpine Championships, the first sanctioned international alpine competition held in America.

When the money actually arrived

People assume Aspen has always been expensive. It has not. For most of the fifties, sixties and seventies it was a cheap, odd, slightly feral town full of ski bums, physicists and people avoiding something — which is exactly why Hunter S. Thompson settled down the road in Woody Creek and nearly got himself elected sheriff in 1970.

The shift came between the mid-eighties and the early nineties. The Silver Queen Gondola opened in 1986 and luxury hotel brands moved in around the same time. From that point the town was a destination for people who were buying exclusivity rather than lift tickets, and property stopped being priced against local wages.

The clearest measure of what that did is not a price chart. It is that Bob Braudis, who was the county sheriff for twenty-four years, lived in subsidised workforce housing. If the sheriff cannot afford the town on a sheriff's salary, the town has changed category.

Why any of this matters at dinner

Because the history did not end — it turned into the way the valley runs today.

A town that physically cannot expand, in a box canyon at the end of a highway that dead-ends, with a workforce priced out of it, becomes a place with two economies. The people who eat in Aspen and the people who cook in Aspen mostly do not sleep in the same town. They pass each other on Highway 82 twice a day, in opposite directions.

That is why this guide covers Basalt, Carbondale and Glenwood Springs on the same footing as Aspen itself, and why the restaurants that stay open when Aspen goes quiet in October are mostly down-valley. The silver crash of 1893 and the dinner you will eat in Carbondale on a Tuesday in November are further apart than they sound, and closer than you would think.