In 1897, self-described social planner Charles W. Caryl envisioned a communal model city in western Boulder County and chose the small mountain community of Delphi in Four Mile Canyon. There, he acquired more than 100 gold mining properties and renamed the town “Wall Street” after New York’s financial district.
A Boulder newspaper’s headline at the time read, “Wall Street is Here” and appeared to assure the site a promising future. Its writer explained that Caryl’s New York “syndicate” would build stores, an assay office and a boarding house. Tracks of the Colorado & Northwestern Railroad (soon to be called the Switzerland Trail) already ran through the townsite.
The name of Wall Street (one word today) stuck, but Caryl’s grandiose plans for a utopia turned into an unfulfilled dream. The assay office and even the foundations of its once-prominent mill are easily recognizable today, yet most passersby are unaware of the area’s colorful past.
With plans in place and money obtained from duped Eastern investors, Caryl formed the Wall Street Gold Extraction Company. As reported in his newspaper, the “Wall Street Gold Miner,” Caryl’s company mined, then processed, gold from nearby mines. By 1902, his company had built a large and impressive mill where ore was crushed and screened, then oxidized in a roasting furnace before it was leached, treated with cyanide, and the gold extracted.
The mill had its own generating plant and was said to have been beautiful at night, brilliantly lit up 40 years before rural electric lines reached surrounding residences.
Caryl had laid out a proposal for his model city in his book “The New Era.” There, he prophesied that each man and woman would produce to the utmost of his and her ability and would be remunerated according to their contributions. There were to be seven classes of workers, designated by a military-style ranking.
Recruits would shovel dirt, handle freight, and do light factory work and housework. Pay for an eight-hour day would be $2. Privates would earn $3 per day (the average salary for miners at the time) to do work “requiring some experience and ability.” Next would be sergeants, defined as “skilled mechanics, accountants, teachers, musicians, salesmen, and saleswomen” who would make $4 per day.
Caryl envisioned lieutenants who, as professionals, would earn $6 per day. Captains, at $10 per day, would be “expert lieutenants,” and majors, to be paid $15 per day, would be “general managers and chiefs of various departments.” Finally, there would be only one general — Caryl himself — with a salary of $25 per day. Actual salaries for those who worked at the Wall Street mill, however, are not known.
In 1903, a newspaper reporter described the mill as an “enormous monument of folly.” By 1907, with attorneys and creditors at his heels, Caryl declared bankruptcy. The mill was dismantled, and its machinery moved on railroad cars to the community of Sugarloaf.
By then, Caryl had left Wall Street, but he stayed in Colorado for a few years and became involved in what some would call questionable schemes. In Denver, he joined a cult named the Brotherhood of Light. Its stated purpose, according to a newspaper account, was to “establish on earth the order and organic systems that prevail in higher spiritual worlds.” The mission included the care of orphans. Before long, though, Caryl was accused of starving to death 13 young children. In 1912, the press noted (without further explanation) that Caryl was charged with “sending obscene matter through the mails.”
Caryl also is credited with inventing “Vrill,” a tonic he claimed that was “a panacea for all the ills and also capable of destroying the strongest army.” By then, Caryl and the Brotherhood of Light had relocated to California where they were reported to be “working out the problem of a higher civilization through the perfection of the sexes.”
Caryl died in 1926 at the age of 68 and is buried in Los Angeles, California. Meanwhile, Wallstreet developed into a successful mining town on its own.
The former assay office is now maintained by Boulder County as the James F. Bailey Assay Office Museum. The stone foundations of the Wallstreet mill remain as well, but Caryl’s shady schemes have long ago faded into oblivion.
