Founded in 1878, Crested Butte is a former coal-mining town turned ski resort nestled in the Elk Mountains of northern Gunnison County. The town lies about twenty-eight miles north of the county seat of Gunnison and about the same distance south of Aspen…

Built in 1892, the Crystal Mill is a log-and-frame structure atop a rocky outcrop along the Crystal River in northwest Gunnison County. At the time of its construction, the “mill” served as a powerhouse for local silver mines, allowing both the mines and…

Gunnison County, named for the American explorer John W. Gunnison, is a large, mountainous county in west-central Colorado. A sparsely populated county of 3,260 square miles, it includes some 1.5 million acres of national forest and wilderness lands,…

John Williams Gunnison (1812–53) was a nineteenth-century US Army officer and explorer. In 1853 he was charged with finding a railroad route across the Rocky Mountains, and while carrying out his mission he explored the Western Slope of Colorado. His…

The Marble Jailhouse was built on East State Street in 1901, as local officials tried to impose order on the growing town and its increasingly diverse working class. The one-room jailhouse, which contains two steel-framed jail cells, was most active…

The deposits in the Crystal River valley are the only major source of marble in Colorado. Quarries in the area were developed most extensively by Channing Meek’s Colorado Yule Marble Company, which constructed a vast marble mill that operated from 1907…

Discovered in 1994, the Mountaineer Archaeological Site consists of more than sixty clusters of prehistoric artifacts on top of Tenderfoot Mountain near Gunnison. The most significant discovery at the site has been structures dating to the Paleo-Indian…