DPL’s Western History/Genealogy Department has many election records in its holdings (including the Denver Elections Division Records, 1921-1991), but today, we came across a 1903 poll book from the nearly-deserted town of Nevadaville, Colorado (-M1772, Gilpin County, Colo. Voting Records, 1895-1903).
Don’t know Nevadaville?
Located outside of Central City, Nevadaville was a Gilpin County town that popped up after John Gregory discovered gold in Mountain City in 1859. As Sandra Dallas notes in her book, Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps:
Prospectors by the hundreds roamed Quartz Hill and Bald Mountain (Nevadaville once was known as Bald Mountain), and by 1861, when Nevadaville was scarcely a year old, it had some twenty quartz mills, a number of stores and hotels, dozens of private dwellings, and hundreds of residents, many of them Irish and Cornish.
By 1900, the population of Nevadaville had declined from over 1,000 residents in 1880 to 823. This downward trend continued—by 1930, Nevadaville’s population plummeted to just two residents.
When one visits Nevadaville today and walks amongst its silent buildings (albeit a Masonic Lodge that still holds regular meetings), it becomes difficult to imagine this place was ever bustling.
Paging through the 1903 poll book, however, Nevadaville comes back to life: a town with voting precincts, a mayoral election, and residents whose votes were tallied by hand.
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