In 1881 the Meyers left Leadville for Kansas City. The Meyer house was completed in fall 1878. A black walnut stairway led to the second-floor bedroom suites. The main floor had a parlor on the south side and a kitchen with an iron cookstove at the rear. Painted white with green trim, the house had double entry doors opening onto a large central hall. The two-story clapboard house faced west, with large windows looking out toward the Great Divide. To house his family, Meyer built an elegant, nine-room residence at the corner of Harrison Avenue and East Ninth Street, at the crest of a hill just north of downtown. Meyer pursued a relationship with Hixon, and the two were married at Tabor’s house in May 1878. Thousands of people flocked to the city, including a twenty-year-old woman named Emma Jane Hixon, who got a job at the local post office run by Horace Tabor.

As a result of Meyer’s activity, Leadville’s boom began in earnest in 1878. Louis Smelting and Refining Company, was the first to ship lead carbonate ores out of the area for assaying (or determining their quality), and he also helped establish the Harrison Reduction Works, the first successful smelter in town. Most importantly, Meyer, working on behalf of the St. Meyer did as much as anyone to launch the area’s silver boom over the next few years. Healy House was originally built by August Meyer, the mining engineer who arrived in what was then California Gulch in August 1876. Dexter’s luxurious Leadville cabin, which was built in 1879 and is the oldest surviving cabin in the city. The house’s grounds now also preserve investor James V. In 1947 the house was acquired by the Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado), which continues to operate it as a local history museum. After the Meyers moved away in 1881, the house served briefly as a Methodist parsonage before becoming a boardinghouse run by the Healy family. The house signaled the arrival of some domestic comforts to the rough-hewn mining camp. A large white-clapboard residence in Leadville, Healy House was built for the family of mining engineer August Meyer in 1878.

The cabin faced west