Cerro Gordo: The Silver Camp That Helped Bankroll Los Angeles's Early Growth

A Discovery in the Inyo Mountains

Silver-lead ore was discovered at Cerro Gordo in 1865, credited to prospector Pablo Flores, who gave the site its name (Spanish for "Fat Hill") for the sheer richness of the deposits near Buena Vista Peak. The mines developed there over the following decade became some of the most productive in the region under the management of Mortimer Belshaw, who arrived from San Francisco in 1868 and built a toll road (the "Yellow Grade Road") to move ore and supplies up and down the mountain.

A Furnace and a Toll Road

Belshaw's real contribution wasn't just capital — it was engineering. He designed and built an improved blast furnace, later called the Belshaw Furnace, that extracted lead and silver efficiently from ore grades earlier, cruder methods couldn't process economically. Getting the resulting bullion down from Cerro Gordo's 8,500-foot elevation was its own problem, solved by the eight-mile Yellow Grade Road Belshaw built and tolled, named for the yellow-tinted rock his crews had to cut through, not for anything else. Controlling the only practical route down the mountain let Belshaw control, and profit from, virtually every ounce of bullion that left it.

The investment paid off dramatically: by 1869, Cerro Gordo was the leading source of both lead and silver in the entire United States, and production peaked in 1874 at roughly eighteen tons of silver-lead bullion a day.

The Los Angeles Connection

Cerro Gordo’s real historical significance lies less in the camp itself than in where its silver bullion went. Ore and bullion from Cerro Gordo were shipped down to the small settlement of Los Angeles for onward transport — freight hauling that historian Remi Nadeau, in his history of the city's founding families, City-Makers, credits as "the silver thread" that helped finance Los Angeles's rise into a real city, at a time when it was still a modest town. Nadeau had a personal stake in the story: his own great-great-grandfather, freighter Remi Nadeau, was among the men who actually drove the bullion wagons down from the mountain.

Decline and Recent Preservation

Cerro Gordo’s richest ore was largely worked out by the 1880s, though sporadic smaller-scale mining, including a brief zinc-mining episode during the First World War, continued into the twentieth century. The site passed through private ownership for decades afterward.

A Fire, and a Very Public Rebuild

In 2018, Brent Underwood and Jon Bier bought the town for $1.4 million with a group of investors, intending to restore and reopen it. On June 15, 2020 — 149 years to the day after it first opened — the American Hotel, one of the site's signature buildings, burned to the ground in a suspected electrical fire that also destroyed an icehouse and a residence. Rather than abandon the project, Underwood documented the rebuilding effort publicly online, and a reconstructed American Hotel was fully framed by 2024 and completed in 2025, keeping Cerro Gordo from disappearing entirely, and turning its restoration into an unusually public one.