Flatiron

not much left - FLATIRON

NAME: Flatiron
COUNTY: Lawrence
ROADS: 2WD
GRID: 1
CLIMATE: Snow in winter-hot in summer.
BEST TIME TO VISIT: Summer. COMMENTS: Much history here.
REMAINS: Not much .

Although there is not much left at Flatiron, it does a storied past. The town was the home of the fabulous Wasp No. 2 gold mine that was discovered in the 1890s. By 1915 it was a bustling mining town with some 30 buildings including a school, some large mills, a post office and several mercantile stores. It was on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad about 2 miles south of Lead. It even had its own railroad that began and ended within the town itself. At the mine, the ore was moved from the open pit over a standard-gauge railroad and conveyed through the mill by gravity flow. A steep spur railroad line was built from the Burlington up to the mill, and fully loaded freight cars were hauled up by a winch. The Burlington then built a special spur to get to the tailings and shipped thousands of carloads of sand to be used as fill and ballast. In 1927, a violent flood covered the spur, the train, the engine and the engineer with many feet of sand. Eventually the mine played and Flatiron became a ghost town. It is, however, a place that lends itself to the imagination as much as any ghost town in the Hills. You can reach Flatiron from either Kirk or Englewood.