Thematic index
Mining Ghost Towns
Most of America's ghost towns died the same way: the ore ran out. Gold, silver, copper, coal, mercury — these are the boom camps that emptied when the ground stopped paying.
Valles Mines, MO
1749–1920Vanished Place
One of Missouri's oldest lead diggings — French mines older than the United States.
Tahawus, NY
1826–1963Verified Ghost Town
The Adirondack ghost twice over — and where Roosevelt learned he was President.
Helena, WI
1828–1860Historic Townsite
A frontier shot-tower town on the Wisconsin River — its lead tower rebuilt in a state park.
Auraria, GA
1832–1849Near-Abandoned
Georgia's gold-rush boomtown — beaten by Dahlonega and then by California.
Shasta, CA
1849–1888Historic Townsite
'Queen City of the North' — a gold-rush brick row the railroad orphaned.
Chinese Camp, CA
1850–1920Near-Abandoned
Once home to thousands of Chinese miners — and California's great tong war.
North Bloomfield, CA
1852–1884Historic Townsite
The town killed by the Sawyer Decision — American environmental law's ground zero.
Central Mine, MI
1854–1898Historic Townsite
A Keweenaw copper town that comes back to life one Sunday a year.
Moonville, OH
1856–1947Vanished Place
Ohio's most haunted-storied tunnel is all that's left of a coal hamlet.
Bodie, CA
1859–1942Verified Ghost Town
A gold-rush boomtown of 8,000, kept in arrested decay since 1962.
Aurora, NV
1860–1919Vanished Place
Mark Twain's first mining town — dismantled brick by brick.
Unionville, NV
1861–1880Near-Abandoned
Where Mark Twain lasted two weeks as a miner. A shady canyon keeps a few residents still.
Bannack, MT
1862–1940Verified Ghost Town
Montana's first territorial capital — fifty buildings you can walk through.
Granite, OR
1862–1940Near-Abandoned
A Blue Mountains gold town founded on the Fourth of July, now barely hanging on.
Vulture City, AZ
1863–1942Historic Townsite
Arizona's richest gold mine, its hanging tree, and a privately restored boomtown.
Chloride, AZ
1863–1944Near-Abandoned
Arizona's oldest mining town — with murals painted on the rocks by a purple-haired prophet.
Stanton, AZ
1863–1905Historic Townsite
Rich Hill's gold camp, named for a scoundrel — now a prospectors' RV hideaway.
Virginia City, MT
1863–1942Historic Townsite
The vigilante capital of the West — saved whole by one stubborn couple.
Nevada City, MT
1863–1876Historic Townsite
Alder Gulch's other city — rebuilt as the West's great open-air museum.
Silver City, ID
1864–1942Verified Ghost Town
Idaho's great preserved mining town — seventy buildings up a dead-end mountain road.
Mandan, MI
1864–1909Vanished Place
The last stop on a wilderness railroad, at the far tip of the Keweenaw.
Belmont, NV
1865–1911Verified Ghost Town
A silver-rush county seat whose brick courthouse still watches an empty valley.
Cerro Gordo, CA
1865–1938Verified Ghost Town
The silver mountain that built Los Angeles — now one man's restoration obsession.
Pithole City, PA
1865–1877Vanished Place
Fifteen thousand people in six months — then an empty field of mowed streets.
Centralia, PA
1866–1992Near-Abandoned
The coal town condemned over a fire that is still burning underneath it.
Tuscarora, NV
1867–1917Near-Abandoned
A silver camp with one of Nevada's largest Chinatowns — now a world-known pottery school.
South Pass City, WY
1867–1872Historic Townsite
Wyoming's great gold-rush ghost town — and the birthplace of women's suffrage.
Hamilton, NV
1868–1887Verified Ghost Town
Twelve thousand people at 8,000 feet — for about three years.
Atlantic City, WY
1868–1875Near-Abandoned
South Pass City's sister camp — a gold town that keeps coming back to life.
Miner's Delight, WY
1868–1882Verified Ghost Town
A BLM-preserved log gold camp in the Sweetwater hills, quiet since the 1870s.
Caribou, CO
1870–1905Vanished Place
Boulder County's silver city at 10,000 feet, reduced to two stone shells.
Ophir, UT
1870–1950Near-Abandoned
A canyon mining town kept alive by two dozen stubborn households.
Shakespeare, NM
1870–1935Historic Townsite
The town renamed by a diamond hoax survivor — kept honest by one ranch family.
Elkhorn, MT
1872–1912Near-Abandoned
Fraternity and Gillian Halls — the two most photographed frame buildings in Montana.
Animas Forks, CO
1873–1920Verified Ghost Town
One of America's highest ghost towns, in a basin above Silverton.
Panamint City, CA
1873–1877Verified Ghost Town
An outlaw silver camp so lawless Wells Fargo refused it — killed by a wall of water.
Darwin, CA
1874–1978Near-Abandoned
A smelter town that boomed three times and now shelters a few dozen desert artists.
Tybo, NV
1874–1937Verified Ghost Town
A silver-lead camp in a lonely canyon, with beehive charcoal kilns still intact.
Pony, MT
1875–1930Near-Abandoned
Stone bank ruins under the Tobacco Roots — with a saloon that never quit.
Candelaria, NV
1876–1939Vanished Place
A silver town so dry that water cost more than whiskey.
Jerome, AZ
1876–1953Near-Abandoned
America's most famous 'living ghost town' — a copper city clinging to a 30° slope.
Frisco, UT
1876–1920Verified Ghost Town
Utah's wildest silver camp — beehive kilns standing where the saloons fell.
Silver Reef, UT
1876–1901Historic Townsite
The town built on a geological impossibility: silver in sandstone.
Marysville, MT
1876–1930Near-Abandoned
Home of the Drumlummon — the Irish immigrant's mine that built a 3,000-person town.
Mystic, SD
1876–1954Vanished Place
A Black Hills gold camp turned railroad end-of-line, now a quiet historic townsite.
Alta, CO
1877–1948Verified Ghost Town
The ghost town wired into history — first customer of long-distance AC power.
Ruby, AZ
1877–1941Verified Ghost Town
Arizona's best-preserved mining camp — schoolhouse, jail, and a bloody border history.
Bayhorse, ID
1877–1915Historic Townsite
A silver-smelter town in a tight canyon, now a state-park ghost town.
Osceola, NV
1877–1920Vanished Place
Nevada's longest-lived placer camp, washed out of the ground below Wheeler Peak.
Lake Valley, NM
1878–1895Historic Townsite
Home of the Bridal Chamber — a cave of nearly pure silver you could chip out by lamplight.
Independence, CO
1879–1899Vanished Place
The town whose last residents skied out on boards torn from their own houses.
Tincup, CO
1879–1918Near-Abandoned
A gold camp so rowdy it buried its marshals — now Colorado's sweetest summer ghost.
Mercur, UT
1879–1913Vanished Place
The cradle of modern gold processing — erased so completely only the cemetery is left.
Custer, ID
1879–1911Historic Townsite
A Yankee Fork gold town preserved along the road to the great dredge.
White Oaks, NM
1879–1900Near-Abandoned
A gold boomtown that dared the railroad — and lost.
Ashcroft, CO
1880–1912Verified Ghost Town
The town that was bigger than Aspen — for about five years.
Crystal, CO
1880–1917Verified Ghost Town
Home of the Crystal Mill — the most photographed ruin in Colorado.
Gilmore, ID
1880–1929Verified Ghost Town
A lead-silver town on the Lemhi plain, waiting on a railroad that came too late.
Chloride, NM
1880–1923Near-Abandoned
A silver camp where the general store sat locked and fully stocked for sixty years.
Golden, NM
1880–1928Near-Abandoned
On the Turquoise Trail, near the site of the first gold rush west of the Mississippi.
Calico, CA
1881–1907Historic Townsite
A Mojave silver boomtown rebuilt by the founder of Knott's Berry Farm.
Maiden, MT
1881–1912Vanished Place
Central Montana's first gold camp — nearly the county seat, now a canyon of cabins.
Comet, MT
1883–1941Verified Ghost Town
A mill town frozen mid-shift on the High Ore Road.
Sims, ND
1883–1947Vanished Place
North Dakota's oldest coal-and-brick town, haunted (they say) by a Gray Lady.
Castle Town, MT
1884–1936Verified Ghost Town
The silver camp Calamity Jane called home — beaten by the Panic by two weeks.
Kirwin, WY
1885–1907Verified Ghost Town
A remote high-country camp abandoned after an avalanche — with Amelia Earhart's unfinished cabin nearby.
Rush, AR
1886–1957Historic Townsite
Arkansas's zinc boomtown — a smelter built to chase silver that never came.
Burke, ID
1887–1991Vanished Place
The Silver Valley town so narrow a hotel let the train run through its lobby.
Monte Cristo, WA
1889–1907Verified Ghost Town
A Cascade gold-and-silver camp you can only reach on foot, wrecked by its own river.
Mogollon, NM
1889–1942Near-Abandoned
A gold-and-silver camp folded into Silver Creek Canyon at the end of a knuckle-white road.
Golden, OR
1890–1920Historic Townsite
The gold camp with two churches, no saloons, and a cemetery full of no one.
Spokane, SD
1890–1940Vanished Place
A Black Hills mine town off the Iron Mountain Road, still standing in the pines.
Goldfield, AZ
1892–1926Historic Townsite
A gold camp below the Superstitions, rebuilt board by board as a tourist town.
Delamar, NV
1894–1909Verified Ghost Town
They called it The Widowmaker. The gold was real; so was the dust.
Pearce, AZ
1894–1940Near-Abandoned
The gold camp that emptied Tombstone — general store still standing proud.
Randsburg, CA
1895–1933Near-Abandoned
A 'living ghost town' with a working soda fountain from 1904.
Garnet, MT
1895–1948Verified Ghost Town
Montana's best-preserved ghost town — thirty buildings deep in the Garnet Range.
Ballarat, CA
1897–1917Near-Abandoned
Supply town of the Panamints, where Seldom Seen Slim was the last of the breed.
Sumpter, OR
1898–1917Near-Abandoned
A Blue Mountains gold town with a giant dredge parked where the boom used to be.
Kaymoor, WV
1899–1962Verified Ghost Town
A coal town in two halves, joined by 821 steps down the gorge.
Gleeson, AZ
1900–1958Verified Ghost Town
Turquoise, then copper, then a restored jail with its own museum keys.
Kendall, MT
1900–1920Vanished Place
A stone-built cyanide boomtown in the Moccasins — walls standing, town gone.
San Toy, OH
1900–1931Vanished Place
A rough Ohio coal town that voted itself out of existence in 1931.
Goldfield, NV
1902–1923Near-Abandoned
Nevada's biggest city in 1906. About 225 people live in what's left.
Cleator, AZ
1902–1954Near-Abandoned
A near-ghost on the old railroad grade, kept alive by one desert bar.
Masonic, CA
1902–1927Verified Ghost Town
A gold camp in the Bodie Hills, always in the shadow of its famous neighbor.
Nighthawk, WA
1903–1951Verified Ghost Town
A hotel, a schoolhouse, and a mill still standing on the Similkameen border.
Rhyolite, NV
1904–1916Verified Ghost Town
Concrete ruins of a five-year gold boom, minutes from Death Valley.
Cochran, AZ
1905–1915Vanished Place
A vanished rail stop on the Gila, marked by five beehive coke ovens.
Skidoo, CA
1906–1917Vanished Place
'23 Skidoo' — a piped-water gold camp remembered for one grim night.
Oatman, AZ
1906–1942Near-Abandoned
Gold camp turned Route 66 legend, where the burros own the street.
Seven Troughs, NV
1906–1918Verified Ghost Town
A high-grade gold canyon whose downstream sister town was swept away by a flash flood.
Wonder, NV
1906–1920Vanished Place
A quartz-vein boomtown that appeared in weeks and lasted just over a decade.
Rawhide, NV
1908–1941Vanished Place
Nevada's last great gold-rush hype — a boom built as much on Wall Street as ore.
Jarbidge, NV
1909–1932Near-Abandoned
One of America's last gold rushes — and its last stagecoach robbery.
Courtland, AZ
1909–1942Vanished Place
Two thousand people, two railroads, a decade — then desert again.
Picher, OK
1913–2009Vanished Place
America's most toxic town — 14,000 people, dissolved by its own mines.
Coolidge, MT
1914–1932Verified Ghost Town
The state's youngest ghost town — a 1920s silver dream with its own railroad.
Treece, KS
1917–2012Vanished Place
Kansas's mirror of Picher: bought out, dissolved, and left to the chat piles.