Maysville, CO

Maysville is a Chaffee County census-designated place in the upper Arkansas Valley, spread along U.S. 50 west of Salida. The 2020 census counted 173 residents, but the community once carried much more weight in the valley. Settlers established a stock ranch here in the 1870s at the junction of the North Fork and South Arkansas rivers. Mineral discoveries up the North Fork and toward Monarch Pass turned Maysville into a mining supply center.

ATTRRobb Hannawacker / Public domain

By 1881, Maysville was a railhead for mines in the South Arkansas drainage, with a Denver and Rio Grande depot and engine house giving the settlement a sense of permanence. The old one-room Maysville School still stands near the highway, a reminder of the town that once held stores, hotels, a bank, and saloons. The silver crash of 1893 sent the boom into reverse, and the place settled into its present small scale. Maysville is high-country history in plain sight: a road, a schoolhouse, a river junction, and the mountain routes that once fed a mining town.