BLACK HAWK HISTORY – LEISURE PURSUITS
Favorite pastimes included: music, dances, ice-skating, bobsledding, church socials, lodge meetings and dinners as well as hunting and fishing. Baseball became the community passion—all the mines, mills, businesses, and boarding houses had their own baseball teams.
“Casting one’s eye around these cloud-consuming
settlements, especially on the day of rest, it seems
astonishing to see what corps of splendidly appearing
specimens of male and female species strew the side walks
and the side hills during sunshine. There must be big
money in millinery and broadcloth in these Sierran stores…”
Weekly Commonwealth, June 15, 1864
OCCASIONS & EXCURSIONS
“The Black Hawk Reed & Silver Band was usually on hand for such special occasions as an excursion to Excelsior Flat near Russell Gulch. Photographer W.C. Steele was kept active making prints of such outings as this one…Other excursions were held throughout the summer months. The little railroad’s own baseball team, known as the Tramway Nine, would play another local team, and booths would be set up to serve food and Mack’s beer. The public was invited to such outings, and the round trip train ticket up to the flat and back to Black Hawk was only four bits.”
The Gilpin Tram, Mallory Hope Ferrell
HIGHER PLAY
“Most agreeable of all our experiences here are the intelligent, active, earnest, right-minded and right hearted young men and women we meet; people, many of whom have been here for years, but instead of losing anything of those social graces that Eastern towns and cities are wont to think themselves superior in, have not only kept pace in these, but gained a higher play for all their faculties, and ripened with opportunity and incentive, and necessary self-reliance, into more of manhood and womanhood.”
Mr. Bowles quoted in The Mines
of Colorado, Ovando Hollister