Halfway through construction of Silverton Town Hall in 1908, the building’s stone façade toppled over into Fourteenth Street. A new contractor was brought in to finish the job, but by then bad luck must already have been stirred into the mortar. In the 1970s another exterior wall began teetering and had to be completely rebuilt. And on a frigid November night in 1992, faulty electrical wiring touched off a raging fire that all but destroyed the building.

In any other community, the building probably would have been razed—and good riddance. But Silverton has a long history of picking up the pieces. One of Colorado’s most remote yet most productive mining towns, it has bounced back from periodic economic depressions, population crashes, a devastating flu epidemic, and almost every other calamity you can name. Just a few months before the Town Hall blaze, Sunnyside Mine—the biggest local employer—abruptly closed, throwing several hundred miners out of work and raising the local unemployment rate to 58 percent.

Many of those laid-off workers found new jobs salvaging Town Hall from the wreckage; the community and the building helped rehabilitate each other. Silverton officials made a point of hiring local contractors and local laborers to do the restoration work, with out-of-town experts providing consulting or training as necessary. But the project yielded more than paychecks; it also boosted morale, becoming the centerpiece of a broader redevelopment drive. So in a very tangible sense, the historic hall served as a foundation for Silverton’s future.

In 1996 the National Trust for Historic Preservation presented Silverton with a National Preservation Honor Award in recognition of its outstanding work on Town Hall. From the community’s standpoint, though, the hall itself is reward enough.