The All-American Tour
The Essential Fifty.
Fifty ghost towns that tell the whole American story — gold camps and coal patches, atomic boomtowns and drowned villages, from the Mojave to the Alleghenies. See them all and your passport says so.
50 stops · 25 states · stamp each one by checking in on site
01Bodie, CAA gold-rush boomtown of 8,000, kept in arrested decay since 1962.02Rhyolite, NVConcrete ruins of a five-year gold boom, minutes from Death Valley.03Bannack, MTMontana's first territorial capital — fifty buildings you can walk through.04Jerome, AZAmerica's most famous 'living ghost town' — a copper city clinging to a 30° slope.05Calico, CAA Mojave silver boomtown rebuilt by the founder of Knott's Berry Farm.06St. Elmo, COColorado's best-preserved ghost town, at the end of a canyon railroad.07Terlingua, TXA mercury-mining ruin near Big Bend that came partway back to life.08Centralia, PAThe coal town condemned over a fire that is still burning underneath it.09Thurmond, WVA railroad town in the New River Gorge where the main street is the tracks.10Kennecott, AKThe richest copper strike ever found — a 14-story red mill in the Alaska wilderness.11Virginia City, MTThe vigilante capital of the West — saved whole by one stubborn couple.12Garnet, MTMontana's best-preserved ghost town — thirty buildings deep in the Garnet Range.13Goldfield, NVNevada's biggest city in 1906. About 225 people live in what's left.14Dana, MAOne of the four towns Boston drowned for the Quabbin — its common still mowed.15Animas Forks, COOne of America's highest ghost towns, in a basin above Silverton.16Ashcroft, COThe town that was bigger than Aspen — for about five years.17Independence, COThe town whose last residents skied out on boards torn from their own houses.18Cerro Gordo, CAThe silver mountain that built Los Angeles — now one man's restoration obsession.19Oatman, AZGold camp turned Route 66 legend, where the burros own the street.20Ruby, AZArizona's best-preserved mining camp — schoolhouse, jail, and a bloody border history.21Shakespeare, NMThe town renamed by a diamond hoax survivor — kept honest by one ranch family.22Mogollon, NMA gold-and-silver camp folded into Silver Creek Canyon at the end of a knuckle-white road.23Rodney, MSAlmost Mississippi's capital, until the river walked away from it.24Grafton, UTAn adobe schoolhouse under Zion's cliffs — the most filmed ghost town in the West.25Frisco, UTUtah's wildest silver camp — beehive kilns standing where the saloons fell.26Thistle, UTDrowned by a moving mountain — Utah's costliest disaster, visible from the highway.27Topaz, UTFor three years, Utah's fifth-largest city — behind barbed wire.28Silver City, IDIdaho's great preserved mining town — seventy buildings up a dead-end mountain road.29Bayhorse, IDA silver-smelter town in a tight canyon, now a state-park ghost town.30South Pass City, WYWyoming's great gold-rush ghost town — and the birthplace of women's suffrage.31Jeffrey City, WYA Cold War uranium boomtown that lost 95 percent of its people in three years.32Shaniko, ORThe self-styled Wool Capital of the World, stranded when the railroad moved on.33Sumpter, ORA Blue Mountains gold town with a giant dredge parked where the boom used to be.34Monte Cristo, WAA Cascade gold-and-silver camp you can only reach on foot, wrecked by its own river.35Holden, WAA copper company town in the North Cascades, reachable only by boat and foot.36Picher, OKAmerica's most toxic town — 14,000 people, dissolved by its own mines.37Times Beach, MOThe town the EPA erased — now a Route 66 state park that doesn't hide its story.38Buxton, IAIowa's Black utopia — a coal town of 5,000 built on rare racial harmony, now bare farmland.39Fayette, MIAn iron-smelting village on a Lake Michigan harbor — preserved almost whole.40Kaskaskia, ILIllinois's first capital — stranded on the wrong side of the Mississippi by a single flood.41Thurber, TXTexas's great coal-and-brick company town — 8,000 people owned lock, stock, and payroll.42Indianola, TXThe port that rivaled Galveston — erased so thoroughly Texans made it a proverb.43Glenrio, TXThe Route 66 town on the Texas–New Mexico line — 'First/Last Motel in Texas.'44Amboy, CARoy's Motel and Cafe and its rocket-age sign, marooned on old Route 66.45Pithole City, PAFifteen thousand people in six months — then an empty field of mowed streets.46Eckley Miners' Village, PANorth America's most complete anthracite patch town — saved by a film crew.47Batsto, NJThe Pine Barrens iron town that armed Washington's army.48Elkmont, TNLogging camp, then society resort, then the Smokies' famous firefly ghost town.49Blue Heron, KYA coal camp rebuilt as ghosts on purpose — steel outlines where the houses stood.50Cahawba, ALAlabama's first state capital, now empty streets you navigate by signpost.