The Callaway brothers came from Delaware, which is flat, and ended up in Leadville, Colorado, at 10,152 feet - high enough that new arrivals often spent their first few days too short of breath to work.
Silver put them there, and the kind of optimism that makes merchants follow a rush to the top of the continent.
By the mid-1880s, William, George, and John Callaway had opened a Leadville branch and built one commercial block at Sixth and Harrison Avenue, and they wanted to do it again, bigger.
They hired George King for a second project at the northeast corner of Harrison Avenue and Seventh Street.
Arched windows, iron cornices, mansard rooflines on three-story brick buildings - King's name was on nearly all of the most prominent commercial work on Harrison Avenue by 1881, enough to make the street look less like a mining camp and more like a real city.
Leadville in 1880 had 30,000 people, a main street packed with hotels, saloons, banks, and department stores, nearly all of it built fast with silver money.
The Callaways' building at the corner of Seventh and Harrison opened in October 1886.
The Delaware Hotel at 700 Harrison Avenue
Building the Delaware Hotel cost somewhere between $60,000 and $80,000, and the sources still disagree on which. John Callaway ran it as proprietor from the start.
Three stories of red brick with a French-style mansard roof, iron cresting along the ridge, an angled corner entry, and paired arched windows across the upper floors.
Steam heat, hot and cold running water, gas lighting, and six bathrooms set it apart from most of Leadville's other options.
The first floor held shop fronts on both the Harrison and Seventh Street sides.
The upper two floors had about fifty rooms - some rented as hotel rooms, some taken by the month as offices, some occupied as long-term residences.
The Callaways called it the Delaware Block as often as the Delaware Hotel.
From day one, it was retail and offices and lodging all at once - part storefront, part business address for the lawyers, merchants, and mining executives who needed somewhere on Leadville's main street.
Offices, Dry Goods, and Nearly Ninety Years of Use
In 1887, the Weils moved their offices to number 8 in the Delaware Block. William Guggenheim was in room 31 in 1888. The Fogel family had taken number 20 by 1891.
None of them were passing through - they were using the building as a working and residential address in a city that was, in those years, still producing serious money.
When the Callaways closed their own Leadville store in 1890, they leased the first floor to R. H. Beggs & Co.'s Dry Goods Store.
By 1902, new owners had renamed it the Crews Beggs Trading Company. The store was still there in 1919.
Leadville's population had been falling for years by then, the silver economy long contracted, but the dry goods store held the ground floor for close to ninety years in total - well past the boom and through most of the long, slow contraction that followed.
The Callaway family sold the building in 1946 for $40,000, roughly half what it had cost to build sixty years earlier.
A Mini-Mall, Two Sales, and a Decade-Long Rehabilitation
In 1980, a Denver company bought the building and turned the first floor into a mini-mall, changing a pattern of first-floor retail use that had run nearly unbroken since about 1890.
The building changed hands twice more in the next six years.
By 1985, Goldman and his wife Charlotte Greenfield were in the middle of remodeling a 99-year-old building that had sat largely derelict on a quieter version of the street it had been built to anchor.
It reopened in 1986 as a hotel and rooming house.
The rehabilitation project connected to the building ran from 1983 to 1993, with $920,000 in qualified restoration expenses and $184,000 in federal tax credits.
The lobby was renovated in 1992. History Colorado gave Delaware Block, Inc. a Stephen H. Hart Award for the rehabilitation in 1993.
Scott and Susan Brackett were putting another $2 million into the building in 1995, while the hotel was already marketing a ski package for that season.
The full rescue moved through at least three ownership groups and took about twelve years.
Famous Names, Ghost Stories, and Disputed Claims
Mary Coffey's ghost is the one people bring up most. But the details don't line up.
The year of her death is given as anywhere from 1889 to 1899, and the place changes too - sometimes inside the hotel, sometimes just outside it.
With that much variation, the story can't really be pinned down. Still, it has been part of Leadville ghost literature for decades.
Doc Holliday is linked to Room 16 in late 1886 and early 1887, in a room with a window over Harrison Avenue.
A longer list of claimed guests includes Molly Brown, Harry Houdini, John Philip Sousa, and Butch Cassidy. None of those visits show up in primary sources.
Kit Williams bought the hotel in 2000 and openly aimed to make the building's history visible to guests. He used period furniture, antiques, and rooms designed to feel like the 1880s, not a generic lodging house.
Williams and his wife, Gail, wanted the place to function as an interactive historical experience. The ghost stories and the claims about famous guests came with that history.
New Owners, a New Restaurant, and a For-Sale Sign
Mineral 1886 opened on the first floor, where Crews Beggs had sold dry goods for ninety years - the first phase of the renovation done, with others still in progress.
Delaware's website still carries undated promises of an elevator "by the end of the year" and a Harrison Avenue ice cream parlor "this winter."
Shape Architecture Studio drew up the renovation in phases when new owners took over in 2021: Mineral 1886, the lobby rebuilt as a bar and lounge, the building's first elevator after 135 years, and a 1950s-themed retail parlor with antique arcade games.
Millions went in between 2021 and 2026, and by October 2025, the Delaware was appearing in Travel and Leisure as a recently refreshed property.
On December 31, Mineral 1886 served a Gatsby-themed New Year's Eve dinner in the lounge. The restaurant runs breakfast and lunch daily, dinner Thursday through Sunday. The Delaware is still taking reservations.
On March 23, 2026, the property went on the market - a 36-key hotel at 700 Harrison Avenue, with the remodeled restaurant and bar listed as part of the package.
