@bearings.travel: Rhyolite, Nevada, is a ghost town in Nye County, roughly 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas and a few miles from the eastern edge of Death Valley. It began on 9 August 1904, when Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross found gold on a hill they named Bullfrog, after the greenish rock they chipped out of it. Early samples assayed at around $3,000 a ton. By early 1905 there was a camp. Within two years there was a city. Accurate population figures from the boom are impossible to obtain — scholarly estimates run from about 3,500 to 5,000, and the town's own newspapers never claimed more than 3,500. What it had by 1907 is the part that is hard to picture now. Electric lights. Water mains. Telephones. Concrete sidewalks. A hospital, a school, an opera house, a stock exchange, a public swimming pool, police and fire departments, and three separate railroads running into it. The Las Vegas and Tonopah depot alone cost about $130,000. The three-storey Cook Bank Building, finished in 1908, cost more than $90,000 and had Italian marble stairs and imported stained glass. In February 1906 a miner named Tom Kelly built a house out of roughly 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles, because lumber was scarce in the desert and bottles were not. Then it went. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the 1907 financial panic dried up investment capital, and in 1908 an independent engineer's report on the main mine sent the stock from $3 to 75 cents. All three banks closed in March 1910. The census that year counted 675 people. The Montgomery-Shoshone mine shut in March 1911. The last newspaper folded in June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913. The last train pulled out in July 1914. In 1916 the power company switched off the electricity and took its lines away. The 1920 census counted fourteen people. By 1922 there was one, a man in his nineties, and he died two years later. The bank, the depot, the jail, the school and the bottle house are all still standing, and it costs nothing to walk through any of it. #nevada #usa

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Tuesday 15 September 2026 01:13:43 GMT