In the years when Colorado’s high country was still raw with the energy of the gold rush, the photographer T. C. Miller set up his camera in Alma, Park County, and recorded a mining frontier at its height. Working under the imprint “Colorado Views, Published by T. C. Miller,” he produced stereoscopic views — paired albumen photographs that, seen through a stereoscope, resolve into a single three-dimensional image — of the towns, mines, freighters, and mountain landscapes of the upper South Platte country.

Alma itself was young when Miller worked there. The town’s post office had opened in 1873, the year Alma incorporated, and Colorado had become a state only in 1876. Perched above 10,000 feet at the foot of Mount Lincoln, Mount Bross, and Mount Democrat, Alma was the supply and milling center for a district whose gold had first been found in nearby Buckskin Gulch. By the early 1880s its streets — often, as Miller’s own camera shows, deep in mud — bustled with miners, freighters hauling ore down from the peaks, and the commerce of a booming camp.

Miller’s stereoviews are a rare visual record of this moment. His subjects range from Alma’s Main Street and business blocks to hydraulic and hard-rock mining operations, ore trains descending Mount Lincoln, and panoramic views of the surrounding Mosquito Range. Because they were made on the spot, in small numbers, and have survived a century and a half, original Miller views in good condition are genuinely scarce and highly collectible.

The collection presented here comprises 46 original T. C. Miller stereoviews of Alma and Park County, dating from 1879 to 1884. Each is offered individually and described in detail. As with all original nineteenth-century photographs, each is a unique survivor — once sold, it is gone.