Cripple Creek headframes Front Range Ceramic Art Tile
— — what the gold rush left to the wind.
Not only on a wall.
“A volcanic caldera on the southwest flank of Pikes Peak, near 9,500 feet. The town sits inside the rim. The headframes stand outside it: wooden gallows over mine shafts, some original to the gold-rush years, some rebuilt after fires. The Mollie Kathleen still lowers tour cages a thousand feet down. The Cresson open pit still moves rock. In between, the old frames hold up against the wind. Twenty-three million ounces came up out of this ground. Most of the timbers are still where the gold was.
Cripple Creek headframes Front Range Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Cripple Creek sits inside the rim of an ancient volcano on the southwest flank of Pikes Peak, at 9,494 feet in Teller County, Colorado. The town is about forty-five miles west-southwest of Colorado Springs, reached by Colorado Highway 67 climbing up from US 24 at Divide. The Cripple Creek-Victor Mining District covers about six square miles, and Cripple Creek and its sister town Victor anchor opposite ends of it. The Cripple Creek Historic District was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. The same volcanic structure that built the surrounding cone is what concentrated the gold; the mines follow ore bodies down through the caldera.
The first gold was found by Bob Womack on Poverty Gulch in 1890, and the strike that built the town came in 1891. By 1900 the district had grown to a combined population near 50,000 across Cripple Creek, Victor, Goldfield, and the smaller camps in between. Winfield Scott Stratton's Independence Lode on Battle Mountain was the first deep mine in the district and produced one of the largest fortunes in Colorado. A pair of fires in April 1896 destroyed most of the original wooden town, and the rebuild in brick is what stands today. The district has produced more than 23 million ounces of gold since 1891, and the Cresson open-pit mine is still in production.
The Mollie Kathleen Gold Mine is the only mine in the district still running underground tours, lowering visitors a thousand feet down in the original cage hoist. The Cripple Creek and Victor Narrow Gauge Railroad runs a four-mile loop past several preserved headframes and old workings, operating from May through October. The American Eagles Overlook above Victor sits more than 10,500 feet up on Bull Hill, looking across the modern Cresson open pit and the surviving frames on the surrounding ridges. The town is about an hour's drive from Colorado Springs by US 24 and Colorado Highway 67, climbing more than 3,000 feet from the plains.