The City of Leadville is a statutory city that is the county seat, the most populous community, and the unaided incorporated municipality in Lake County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 2,602 at the 2010 census and an estimated 2,762 in 2018. It is situated at an elevation of 10,152 feet (3,094 m). Leadville is the highest incorporated city in the United States and it is along with two of the tallest 14,000 foot peaks in the state.

Leadville is a former silver mining town that lies in the middle of the headwaters of the Arkansas River within the Rocky Mountains. The Leadville Historic District, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961, contains many historic structures and sites of Leadville’s mining era. In the late 19th century, Leadville was the second most populous city in Colorado, after Denver.

The Leadville Place was first established in 1859 similar to placer gold was discovered in California Gulch during the Pikes Peak Gold Rush. Prospectors panned for gold in the stream that ran through California Gulch in what became the town of Oro City (oro is the Spanish word for gold). Horace Tabor, who became known as the “Leadville Silver King”, and his wife Augusta were in the midst of the first prospectors to arrive in Oro City. His wife made keep as postmistress, banker, cook, and laundress even if Tabor was a prospector.

The yet to be miners had noted that mining for placer gold was hampered by heavy black sand in the sluice boxes, and in 1874 it was discovered that the heavy sand that impeded gold recovery was the gain mineral cerussite, which has a high silver content. Prospectors traced the cerussite to its source, present daylight Leadville, and by 1876 had discovered several silver-lead lode deposits. As the gold has been tapped out of the gulch and attention was averted to easy to attain to Leadville, a mile or two away, Oro City became a ghost town.