St. Rose of Lima, Lake City
 
The history of Lake City has as many steep peaks and deep drops as the skyline of the surrounding San Juan Mountains.  The most precipitous peak was the boom of 1874.  Before that, the Ute Indians hunted and camped near the grass and willow covered marsh pasture that is Lake City today.
After the Brunet Treaty of 1874, prospectors and miners descended on the pasture and began building cabins.  Supply stores and other business followed.  In the autumn of 1875, gold and silver strikes had attracted so many people that the town was visibly growing by the hour.  By 1879, Lake City was home to over 4,000 residents.
Fr. Thomas Hayes organized the parish in Lake City in 1877.  Under his direction funds were raised and a church built.  The church, a frame structure, 30 by 60 feet, with a seating capacity of approximately seventy, was completed and dedicated in 1878 at the cost of $1,500.
In 1879 ore production was dizzyingly high, and the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad began grading for track to the budding metropolis of Lake City, the seat of Hinsdale County.  But the boom and bust cycle of the next fifty years began in earnest when the railroad delayed running track to the town in favor Silverton, Ouray, Telluride and Rico.  When the track was finally laid in 1889, the richest mines were already in peak production.  Within ten years the mines would dry up and the miners, and the businessmen who followed them, would move on.
Lake City suffered the fate of so many other Colorado mining towns, and the population dwindled rapidly.  in 1899, a census showed fifty families and two hundred fifty souls in St. Rose of Lima's Parish.  But by 1902 there were not sufficient Catholics to support a resident priest, and the parish was reduced to a mission.
When the majority of the miners left Lake City in 1897, the composition of the population became what it is today:  a tightly knit community of independent souls who enjoy the winters and isolation, added to by summer residents.  At present, the congregation consists of eleven permanent families, with many Catholic visitors during the summer.
Aside:  Lake City was the scene of national attention in the 1870's when Alfred Packer was tried for murder in the Hinsdale County Courthouse after he returned from an expedition, and the five men who had gone with him, were found dead and cannibalized.