Students from Jamestown and Mesa elementary schools traveled back in time! Gold Hill Elementary students and staff welcomed more than 90 kids to their small town and showed them what it was like back in the 1800s, when the school was originally established. The Gold Hill students and staff dressed in period-attire and led different activities that students would have done back then, like playing marbles and sack races. In town, they could explore historic buildings like the Gold Hill Store and the Bluebird Lodge and Museum. They also got to learn about blacksmithing and trading at a mountain man camp set up by Gold Hill residents.
Mountain Ear News: Gold Hill: Walking In History’s Footsteps
Barbara Lawlor, Gold Hill. Emmit Hoyl and Andy Martinek are reality blacksmiths; they actually use five-pound sledges to fashion knives and hand drills, horse shoes and iron railings. On Friday, the two long-time friends and mountain residents wore their worn blacksmith jeans and battered hats and showed fourth grade students from Gold Hill, Jamestown and Mesa Elementary School how to use an anvil, fire up a forge and create a tool out of metal that grows underground.
Each year, the Gold Hill School students and Town of Gold Hill hosts a mining history re-enactment all day event that includes myriads activities that are set up around town. Many of the stations are set up outdoors, at the Colorado Mountain Ranch, the school and across from the Gold Hill Inn; the students divided into four groups that rotate to the various stations.
Mike and Linda Walker are the hosts at the Colorado Mountain Ranch, an historical family run camp that brings in kids from all over the country, either as campers or counselors to spend time learning about life in the mountains, horses and history.
On Friday, a group began their day learning how to lasso Tofu, Bertha, Lola and Sampson, who didn’t move much but still managed to evade more lariats than be captured by them. Fourth grader Adrianne Ackerman said she like taming a cow. “I made the rope as big as I could and threw it. They used to need the cows to get milk or to have leather. It was fun.”
While the cowpokes did their thing, another group of students panned for gold guided by Mike Walker, who showed them how to swish the gravel looking for glimmering specks of metal. “Eureka!” He shouts at a shining speck. Walker had a large collection of gold samples which was lost in the Fourmile Fire. “I didn’t go back to look for them. I don’t store stuff anymore.”
Elias Walker, 10, wearing a raccoon hat, said he found gold at his house and was going to send it to a lab to be analyzed. “I like math and science and someday I want to be a biochemist and learn about mushrooms and help with oil and radiation.”
Up at the massive lodge on the top of the hill, on the wraparound deck on the second floor, Josie Walker who grew up at the ranch, gathers Jamestown students around her and tells them her favorite story, the spider legend, shared with them how people wrangled the sun and threw rocks into the sky to make stars.
“When I say home, you go home,” announced the line dance caller, sending the students skipping through a gauntlet of raised arms, as they learned more complicated moves and danced their way up and down the porch, gaining exuberance with experience.
At round tables, the kids were allotted four beads apiece and shown how to make friendship bracelets and necklaces, which they exchanged with each other or took home to share with friends and family. They bent over their work as intent as if they were using their iPhones. But they weren’t.
After lunch, the children walked to the center of town where Becca Hawk sat in front of a make shift tent displaying household artifacts and offering tastes of bison, bear, boar and beef jerky. They watched the blacksmiths form shapes from melted steel while smoke billowed around the anvil.
Blacksmith Emmit Hoyl is on the hand drill competition circuit and is on a quest to break the world record. He has won frequent world championships and he drilled 15 3/8 inches, a record for him this summer, but he wants to break Scott Havens 1991 record of 16 3/8 inches in Carson City. It is a life goal, his peak in the future.
At the end of the day, 85 fourth grade students relished the perfect day in the small historic mining town where the past was brought into the present.
(Originally published in the September 20, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)
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