a town by the state of North Carolina. Unfortunately for the citizens of the area, the railroad chose not to run through the growing small town, and it began to dry up like the pond for which it was originally named. For much of its existence, "downtown" consisted of a few houses, a handful of stores, a couple of churches, a school, a barber shop, a post office, a bank, and a cotton gin. The 1902 Soil Survey map of the Hickory, North Carolina area, shows Denver having a small grid of streets running along what are now Highway 16 Business and Campground Road. By 1914, the soil survey map of Lincoln County showed only a grid of three short streets running northwest to southeast parallel to what is now Highway 16 Business and one street running parallel to Campground Road (which still exists and was called by locals for many years "Back Street"). Apparently, one of the short streets perpendicular to Campground Road ran beside what is now the telephone building on St. James Church Road, and another of these perpendicular streets connected to what is now Campground Road right at the Rock Springs Campground. Another part of the "street grid" for Denver was Cemetery Road. It ran beside Denver United Methodist Church and was perpendicular to Highway 16, then turned in front of the community cemetery and intersected with Campground Road. The portion that ran beside the church and perpendicular to the highway was "graded under" by the church in the late 1990s. For a brief period during the 1890s–1910s, Denver was home to small-scale gold prospecting, particularly in the area near the former Triangle School and the community now known as Westport. 20th century to present Denver remained largely a farming community, with cotton as the primary cash crop supplemented by "truck farming" vegetables to area towns (with tomatoes and strawberries being among the most often marketed vegetable crops). Members of local families began commuting to work in textile mills in the surrounding communities of Mooresville, Lincolnton, Cornelius, Maiden, and Mount Holly just before World War II, and continued up until the early 1970s. Having failed to elect a local government for many years, Denver lost its official incorporated status in 1971 by vote of the state legislature. It was the filling of a much larger pond, Lake Norman, that led Denver to grow in ways that