Located about eleven miles south of Aspen in Castle Creek Valley, Ashcroft was established in 1880 as a silver mining camp. It quickly grew to more than 2,000 residents and briefly rivaled Aspen, but it was already declining by the late 1880s because the…

Located just west of Independence Pass at an elevation of about 10,900 feet, the town of Independence was established in 1879 and boomed briefly in the early 1880s, reaching an estimated population of 1,500. In the mid-1880s, the town’s harsh climate and…

The Wheeler/Stallard House is a three-story Queen Anne style residence built in 1888–89 by Jerome B. Wheeler on the west side of Aspen. Edgar and Mary Ella Stallard occupied the house from 1905 to 1945, when Walter Paepcke acquired it for use as overflow…