Jeffrey City

The story

Jeffrey City is one of the fastest busts in the American West, and a recent one. The spot began in the 1930s as a lonely homestead and gas stop called Home on the Range. Then uranium was discovered nearby in 1954, a mining operation followed under an Atomic Energy Commission contract, and the company town that grew up around it was renamed for Dr. Charles Jeffrey, a Rawlins physician who helped finance it.

The boom was enormous for so remote a place. By 1979 about 4,500 people lived here, roughly 1,000 of them working the uranium mine and mill, and the school held close to 600 students. Then the uranium market collapsed — energy conservation and the fallout from the Three Mile Island accident sent prices tumbling — and the mine shut down in 1982. More than 95 percent of the town's population left within three years.

Around 60 people remain, scattered among empty apartment blocks, a boarded-up school, and quiet streets on the open sagebrush of central Wyoming. A few holdouts, including a well-known potter, keep the place from being entirely silent, but Jeffrey City is the textbook single-industry boomtown gone bust.

What remains today

Vacant apartment blocks and houses, an empty school, a church, a bar, and wide empty streets — the shell of a town built for thousands.