Rhyolite Nevada is the apotheosis of American ghost towns.
In less than 20 years, or a little longer than it took to extract every
ounce of valuable ore from the surrounding rock, Rhyolite rose from
a few scattered mining camps to a bustling city with its own stock exchange
and electrical plants to an empty, rotting shell with no human inhabitants.
Today all that remains are a few concrete and rebar skeletons and a
decaying novelty house built out of liquor bottles.
Prospectors Shorty Harris and E. L. Cross are credited with founding
Rhyolite in 1904, when their discovery of the region’s mineral
riches prompted over 2,000 claims within a 30 mile area. The town truly
began to boom with the opening of the hugely successful Montgomery Shoshone
Mine. Soon the “Queen City of Death Valley” had over 5,000
inhabitants, and the familiar staples of all mining towns, brothels,
saloons and cheap hotels, began to be edged aside by hospitals, schools
and banks, including a 3-story concrete structure, part of which is
still standing today.
1907 was the year of Rhyolite’s peak. The city gained electricity
(from 2 separate plants) and an interesting new building in the form
of miner Tom Kelly’s adobe and “recycled” glass Bottle
House. But the financial panic of ’07 was the knell of doom for
Rhyolite. Banks began to close, mines and mills yielded less profit,
and the people began to move away. The Montgomery Shoshone mine closed
in 1911. The power went off in 1916. By 1920 only 14 citizens remained.
There’s not much left in Rhyolite today, but the site contains
much more than many of the countless ghost towns in the American west
thanks to Rhyolite’s sturdier buildings (a side-effect of its
initial success). Tom Kelly’s bottle house is being repaired again,
but will not last long; it was hardly a structure built to stand the
test of time. Anyone visiting Death Valley California should take a
look at the ruins of Rhyolite, if only for curiosity’s sake, but
perhaps also to learn what they can from its history and its impermanence.
