Founded in 1893 at the foot of Battle Mountain near what became the richest gold mines in the Gold Camp, Victor grew almost overnight from a crude mining camp of tents and shacks into one of Colorado’s most prosperous and populous cities, briefly becoming the state’s fifth largest city. In its early years, false-fronted pine buildings lined dirt streets and boardwalks, housing was scarce, water was sold by the bucket, and single male miners depended on the city’s many lodging houses, eating establishments, businesses, and redlight district. After the Florence & Cripple Creek Railroad reached Victor in May 1894, more substantial hotels, stores, shops, and offices were built, but dense development on narrow lots left most of the commercial district still dominated by wooden buildings. By 1897, Victor had 8,000 people and more than 140 businesses, yet on the afternoon of August 21, 1899, a fire that began in a pine shack in Paradise Alley behind Jennie Thompson’s 999 Dance Hall on Portland Avenue, driven by strong winds, swept through flimsy structures and destroyed twelve blocks of the business district, about 200 buildings, and an estimated $2 million in property, leaving more than 3,000 people homeless. Hundreds of men cleared debris the next morning, businesses reopened in tents and makeshift structures, and the City Council funded a new City Hall, ordered street regrading, and required temporary frame buildings to be removed within 90 days while all new commercial buildings were to be made of brick or stone. Investors and speculators quickly backed reconstruction, and within eight months Victor was rebuilt as a new and more substantial city, with many of the brick and stone business district buildings dating from late 1899 or early 1900.