How Denver’s Silver Money Built a Hill of Mansions and Then Lost It All: Capitol Hill

How Denver's silver millionaires built a hill of mansions, and how one crash in 1893 took almost all of it away. The most famous house in Denver sold in 1932 for $6,000 and was nearly torn down in 1970. The only reason its famous owners ever lived there is that the same year everyone else on the hill went broke, they got rich. This is the story of Capitol Hill. Horace Tabor came to Colorado with an oxen wagon, struck silver in Leadville and was worth more than six million dollars within a year. He built an opera house, left his wife Augusta for a divorcée called Baby Doe, served thirty days in the U.S. Senate and married her in Washington. Denver society never let her in. Then the silver market collapsed, and with it the mansions, the opera house and nearly every fortune on the hill. Along the way: a silver king who died working as a postmaster, a widow found frozen in a shed beside a Leadville mine, an ex-wife who walked away and died a millionaire, and the one family on Capitol Hill that came out of 1893 richer than they went in, because their money came from gold. Real names, real dates, from the public record. Subscribe 🔔    / @coloradorevealed   for new videos every few days about the towns, costs and forgotten stories of Colorado! Watch next ▶️    • 10 Places in Colorado the Mob Used to Control   Have a town or county you want us to cover? We got you! #colorado #ColoradoRevealed #denver #history #capitolhill