The Hamill House shows a silver baron's Georgetown

If the Hotel de Paris shows how a fancy mining-town business looked, the Hamill House shows how a wealthy resident lived. It sits in Georgetown and was the home of William Hamill, who grew rich during the silver boom and expanded a modest house into a showpiece.

The home reflects the money that silver brought to Georgetown in the 1800s. Hamill added on and dressed it up over time, and outbuildings behind the house served as his office and carriage house. It was the kind of property that signaled status in a busy mountain town.

Then the silver economy fell apart. The crash of 1893 hit Colorado’s silver towns hard, and the house’s showpiece days ended. It slid into a long, quiet decline. Decades later, the preservation group Historic Georgetown, Inc. took on the property, and today it is cared for as a historic house museum.

That arc, boom, bust, and rescue, is the story of Georgetown itself. The Hamill House survives because people chose to save it rather than tear it down.

For someone exploring the county’s history, this is one of several preserved sites that explain why Georgetown looks the way it does. To plan a visit or read the verified history, start with Historic Georgetown, Inc. and History Colorado.