Most towns throw down asphalt or cobblestones when paving their streets. Victor, Colorado used actual gold ore. During the frenzied 1890s Cripple Creek Gold Rush, this mountain town had so much low-grade ore and mine waste lying around that using it as pavement just made practical sense.

But here's where it gets really interesting: what seemed worthless in boom times became a goldmine—literally—decades later.

When Gold Was Too Common to Care About

Victor earned the nickname "The City of Mines" because the richest gold deposits in the entire Cripple Creek Mining District sat right on Battle Mountain above town. Operations like the Gold Coin Mine were pulling out $50,000 per month in high-grade ore. With that kind of wealth pouring out of the ground, who cared about the low-grade stuff?

Mine operators faced a practical problem: mountains of waste rock and tailings with just trace amounts of gold mixed in. The Woods Brothers, who ran the Gold Coin Mine, got creative. They built elaborate tunnel systems beneath Victor's streets to transport waste to dumps and processing facilities thousands of feet away. But plenty of that auriferous material ended up in the simplest place possible—right under people's feet as street paving.

The Depression-Era Plot Twist

Fast forward to the 1930s. The Great Depression had hit, gold prices had shifted, and extraction technology had improved. Suddenly that "worthless" paving material looked pretty valuable.

So Victor did what any sensible mining town would do: they scraped up their own streets and ran the material through mills to extract the gold. What had been too low-grade to bother with in the 1890s became profitable enough to literally dig up the roads for.

Think about the economics of that for a second. It was worth the labor and equipment costs to remove, transport, and process the street paving because there was enough gold content to turn a profit. That's not metaphorical richness—that's geological absurdity.

The Legacy Continues

Today, the Cripple Creek & Victor area still operates active gold mines, though modern operations use open-pit techniques suitable for low-grade ore deposits. The district has produced over 23 million ounces of gold since the 1890s, making it one of Colorado's most productive mining regions.

Victor's gold-paved streets stand as perhaps the most literal example of "boom and bust" mining economics. One generation's trash really was another generation's treasure—it just happened to be the same town doing both the discarding and the reclaiming.

Next time someone uses "streets paved with gold" as a metaphor for opportunity, remember Victor, Colorado didn't need the metaphor. They had the real thing under their boots, went broke anyway, then dug it all back up when times got tough. That's the kind of plot twist only mining history can deliver.

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