The story
For a few years Goldfield was the largest city in Nevada. Gold was found here in 1902, and by 1906 roughly 20,000 people had arrived, along with banks, four newspapers, a stock exchange, and the Goldfield Hotel — the most luxurious building between Chicago and San Francisco when it opened in 1908. The town staged the 1906 Gans–Nelson lightweight championship, a 42-round fight promoted purely to put Goldfield in the papers. It worked.
The mines produced over $80 million in gold, but the richest ore was gone within a decade. A flash flood tore through in 1913, and in 1923 a moonshine still explosion started a fire that burned more than fifty square blocks of the mostly wooden town.
Goldfield never quite died — it's still the Esmeralda County seat, with about 225 residents. The stone courthouse still holds court under its original Tiffany lamps, the high school and the hulking hotel still stand, and the surrounding blocks are a grid of foundations, headframes, and desert.
What remains today
The Goldfield Hotel, the 1907 courthouse (still in use), the high school, the railroad depot, mining headframes, and the International Car Forest of the Last Church — 40 graffitied cars planted nose-down in the desert at the edge of town.
Questions from the field
- Is Goldfield, Nevada a real ghost town?
- Goldfield is a near-ghost town: about 225 residents remain and it's still the Esmeralda County seat, but the town holds a fraction of the 20,000 people it had in 1906, and much of the original townsite is ruins and empty blocks.
- Can you visit the Goldfield Hotel?
- Only from outside on most days — the hotel is privately owned and closed to casual entry. Periodic guided tours run during events like Goldfield Days in August.
- How do I get to Goldfield?
- Goldfield sits directly on US-95, about 25 minutes south of Tonopah. No dirt-road driving is required — it's one of the easiest Nevada ghost towns to reach.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Goldfield — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Goldfield's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Sources consulted
- — USGS GNIS feature 854468
- — U.S. Census (Goldfield CDP, 2020)
- — Nevada Historical Society — Goldfield mining district records
- — Esmeralda County — county seat records