Old Hundred Mine Silverton San Juans Ceramic Art Tile
— — still up there, after everyone left.
Not only on a wall.
“A wooden boarding house pinned to a cliff above Cunningham Gulch, five miles northeast of Silverton. The Niegold brothers staked the first claim here in 1872. The mine that grew up around it produced gold, silver, lead, and zinc, and the boarding house you see from the road was set high enough that miners walked to work along a tramline before sunrise. The portal at the bottom of the gulch is open as a tour now. The boarding house stays where it was left. Spruce and scree, and the kind of quiet that settles where a town once tried to be.
Old Hundred Mine Silverton San Juans 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.
The Old Hundred Gold Mine sits in Cunningham Gulch in the western San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, about five miles northeast of Silverton, the county seat of San Juan County. The portal opens off a forest road in the gulch, at roughly 10,200 feet of elevation. Silverton itself, at 9,318 feet, is one of the highest incorporated towns in the United States and the southern terminus of the Million Dollar Highway, U.S. Route 550, which crosses Red Mountain Pass from Ouray. The mine is now operated as a working tour mine from late May into early October. The original boarding house remains visible on the cliff above, pinned to the rock where the miners left it.
The mountain above Cunningham Gulch lies in the San Juan volcanic field, an enormous expanse of layered ash and andesite that erupted roughly 35 to 23 million years ago and now holds one of the richest mineral districts in North America. The Old Hundred vein carries gold, silver, lead, copper, and zinc in narrow fissures cutting the volcanic rock. The Niegold brothers, three German immigrants, staked the original claim in 1872 and worked the upper levels by tramline for the next several decades. The mine's name has been read two ways over the years: the hymn 'Old Hundredth' the Niegolds were said to sing, and the consolidation of roughly a hundred individual claims under one ownership.
The tour mine operates from late May through early October. Visitors board a battery-electric mine train at the portal in Cunningham Gulch and ride roughly 1,500 feet into the mountain along Level 5, the lowest of the workings. Inside, retired miners demonstrate the air-leg drills, slushers, and stope equipment that defined hard-rock mining in the San Juans through the twentieth century. The mine interior holds steady near 47 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, so a jacket is part of the experience. The boarding house on the cliff above is not part of the tour and is best read from the road through the gulch.