12/27/2022 0 Comments Ghost townI have been here for more than a month now. All the food I brought with me is gone, but luckily Robert left a pretty large store of tins. The town has electricity, but no running water. It rises 4,500ft over seven miles, so it was now completely impassable.Īnd then, because of the pandemic, California issued a “shelter in place” order, so there were two reasons I couldn’t leave. It got to the point where I could barely open my front door. I left it in the middle of the single-lane road and walked the rest of the way. ![]() ![]() My truck didn’t even make it all the way it was stuck, spinning out in the snow 500 yards before town. Mother Nature had other plans.Ī snowstorm hit the night I arrived. There are 22 buildings, including a church, hotel and general store I thought I could repair some and we could start renting them out to visitors. I originally planned on staying a week or two. His wife lives in Arizona and he wanted to be with her before lockdown began, so he asked if I could watch over the town to keep it safe from looters. When the coronavirus pandemic started, I got a call from Robert. Everything takes an age, because it’s so hard to get people or materials here. On Friday 13 July 2018, we closed the deal.įor the next year or so things went slowly we waited for permits and tried to make a start on the renovations. So, I scraped together my life savings and convinced a few investors to get involved. When I saw Cerro Gordo, I thought it would be incredible if people could stay there. But I was 30 years old, the hostel was doing well and I was looking for a project that was more of a challenge. I’ve always liked that combination of hospitality and history. I own a backpacker hostel in Austin, Texas, which was built in 1892. I grew up in Florida and consider myself a bit of an entrepreneur. Now there was just a caretaker called Robert who has kept watch over the town for 21 years, protecting it from the occasional looting attempt, and the whole town was for sale. When the mines closed in the 1930s, almost everyone left and the abandoned town changed hands several times. There’s a rumour that Butch Cassidy hid out there for a while. There was a history of gun fights at one point police were reporting a murder a week. At its height, it had about 4,000 residents, mostly miners who spent their time seeking their fortunes and drinking a lot. It was a piece of American history straight out of a wild west movie: an abandoned 19th-century silver-mining town about 200 miles from Los Angeles. ![]() It said: “Wanna buy a ghost town?” I thought it was a weird joke, but I clicked on the link and started reading about Cerro Gordo. View our printable Ghost Town Map Here PDF Format 2.5 Mb.I got a text from a friend at 2am one night in the summer of 2018. More than a score of these towns have enough life in spite of the ravages of vandals and weather to be interesting to the special breed of human whose eyes light up at the mention of them. Quite a few towns have a number of inhabitants. If you look, you can read the names of legendary people written in the dust: Johnny Ringo, Russian, Bill, Toppy Johnson, Roy Bean, Butch Cassidy, Madame Varnish, Black jack Ketchum, Mangas Coloradas, Billy the Kid, James Cooney. They molder into oblivion, their shells of buildings like specters against the sky, these towns that witnessed some of America’s most romantic and rapacious history.Īnd if you listen, you can hear the names of fabled mines whispered on the wind: Bridal Chamber, Confidence, Little Hell, Calamity Jane, Hardscrabble, Mystic Lode, North Homestake, Little Fanny, Spanish Bar. Literally hundreds of towns not only died, they vanished.īy some estimates, New Mexico is home to more than 400 ghost towns - most are nothing more than a few foundations and some occasional mining equipment.īut traces of many linger on, haunting ties to days that used to be. A few were farming communities that flourished for a time and mysteriously fell silent. ![]() Most were mining towns, where men lusted after the earth’s riches - gold, silver, turquoise, copper, lead and coal. But in the late 1800s, each had a moment of glory that blazed and died like a sudden flame.
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