Stereograph of Poncha (now Poncha Springs) in Chaffee County, Colorado, taken circa 1882-1883 by George E. Mellen. The image shows an aerial shot of Poncha from Cemetery Hill. The foreground is composed of a fragment of Cemetery Hill and a large stretch of empty land. Several unidentified buildings built in various styles are scattered across the length of the picture. Beyond the structures is another empty stretch of land with the mountains in the background.
Photographer George E. Mellen ran his own studio in Gunnison during the early 1880s. Mellen traveled throughout the region to mining camps and new towns from Monarch Pass to the Elk Mountains and west to Grand Junction. In 1888, he opened a studio in Colorado Springs which closed within a year. This failure sent him to work at William Henry Jackson’s (1843-1942) studio and the Detroit Publishing Company in Denver. This arrangement lasted until the 1890s when Mellen turned over his negatives to Jackson who would go on to publish them under his own name.