The story
Molson was a promoter's town. Founded in 1900 by George Meacham and the Canadian banker John Molson near the Canadian border, it filled out fast with stores, saloons, a hotel, and an assay office and hit about 300 people that first year. Then the money left: when the Molson company pulled its backing, the population crashed to just 12 residents by June 1901.
It recovered as a wheat and homestead district but could not stay put. A dispute with the townsite owner sent residents and businesses half a mile north to found New Molson in 1909, and the settlement essentially split. The farming economy thinned over the following decades.
In 1960 a local named Harry Sherling gathered pioneer buildings and equipment into what is now the Old Molson Ghost Town, an outdoor museum, with the old brick schoolhouse nearby preserved as a second museum. It is free, open in daylight, and one of the more approachable ghost towns in the state.
What remains today
The Old Molson outdoor museum — pioneer buildings, a bank, homestead cabins, and farm equipment — plus the 1914 brick schoolhouse museum a short distance away.
Questions from the field
- Is Old Molson ghost town free to visit?
- Yes — the Old Molson outdoor museum and the nearby schoolhouse museum are free and open during daylight hours, run by a local nonprofit in the Okanogan Highlands.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Molson — 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 Molson's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 1523307
- — Molson Museums (Old Molson Ghost Town)
- — Okanogan County Historical Society