History of Silver County

Without a university, Silver Cliff’s development followed a very different path. It was the focus of the Climax Mountain silver boom, as well as the center of the region’s ranching, farming, and timber industries. The mills in downtown Silver Cliff converted ore into precious and not-so-precious metals that were then shipped by rail across the country. Following the silver boom, the economy was bolstered by a small military test facility located in the prairies outside of town. It also attracted a number of modest manufacturing plants which supplied a steady stream of moderate income jobs.

Recently, however, the community has fallen on harder times, with many of its manufacturing jobs lost to international producers. The timber industry has languished because of environmental concerns and the fact that the most profitable stands had already been cut. Still, Silver Cliff has been through hard times before, and the community has always managed to sustain itself. People liked the traditional, low-key, small-town atmosphere and there was little desire to join the hectic modern world.

The land between the two communities is a patchwork of private land holdings and Forest Service land. In the 1990s, the latest technology boom started to change things. Highly profitable new technology firms prowled the county, looking for desirable places to establish their sprawling new campuses. In the highly competitive environment, the ability to offer employees real quality of life often made the difference between success and failure.

Vermillion was just the sort of place that these companies sought. In the mid-‘90s two companies bought and moved onto spectacular ranches, while countless imitators and spin-offs flooded the area with new and quite wealthy citizens.

It was these individuals who tipped Vermillion’s local balance of political power toward growth and high technology. Many long-time residents, who didn’t like these developments, sold out and left as housing prices soared.

The area was becoming increasingly urbanized, with new shopping centers and office parks, causing demands for an enlarged airport and even faster highways. Areas within reasonable commuting reach of Vermillion were rapidly filling up. There were strong demands for the new highways required to open up new areas for development.

To the residents of Silver Cliff, the surrounding countryside had always been a prized natural playground. Not surprisingly, they came to view Vermillion’s sprawling development with horror. Especially alarming to Silver Cliff residents was the leap-frog nature of development. Everyone seemed to want a pristine setting for their new development. Newcomers, for the most part, had left congested and, from their perspective, quite unlivable cities behind.

They were thrilled with the opportunity to live in a rural, small town setting – the kind of lifestyle that Silver Cliff and Vermillion residents had enjoyed for decades. While congestion was annoying, they saw it as a temporary problem which could be alleviated once infrastructure development caught up.

Newcomers were, however, distressed with the hostile reception that they received from the old-timers. They felt that many community institutions were badly in need of modernization. Schools needed a more challenging curriculum, especially in mathematics and science. After all, students needed to be trained to compete in the high-tech world. There were also differences in social philosophy; newcomers tended to be more liberal than the old-timers.

Moreover, environmentalists, many of whom lived in Vermillion, had initiated a complaint with the EPA to force current and previous owners of the Silver Cliff land to clean up the old Silver Cliff Mining Company’s land. Long defunct, the mining company had used 400 acres of land for depositing of mine tailings and for the slurry resulting from their metals operations. Creeks from the land flowed into the Wamasana, and the groundwater was contaminated. Over the past 50 years, the Slippery Creek neighborhood developed on the land being sold. The land was quite inexpensive, and the neighborhood developed into a working class and migrant labor community with a mix of Latino, white, and African American residents. The contamination underlies the neighborhood. Recent testing of several wells have indicated the water is contaminated as well.

Tensions also arose between the new environmental community which proposed limits on relatively free access to the Hill country which old-timers enjoyed. Hunting, fishing, and the use of four-wheel drive roads were facing increasing environmental challenges.  Still, for many, the real problem was increasing settlement and urbanization, especially in crucial valley-bottom wetlands. With several major lawsuits now pending, the community is rapidly approaching the point where important environmental decisions will have to be made.