Ghost Towns

My just completed Montana bike tour took me to four historic towns - two live and two dead: Virginia City, just up the road from Nevada City, Bannack and Coolidge.  Bannack was the first Montana territorial capital (and the site of the first brick building in Montana - its "capitol"), and Virginia City, the first State capital designated when it became a state in 1865, until wrested away by Helena ten years later. 

Virginia and Nevada City continue today as restored tourist destinations, with Virginia City designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1961.  The notoriety of the violent town it once was is easily discernible through the various historical plaques.  Nevada City still shows the spoils of mining along Alder Creek.

Virginia City - old times live on: ice cream in the shade!

Bannack, founded as a gold mining town in 1862, had 3,000 people within a few years, and existed in steady decline until it was fully abandoned by the early 1950's, It is an interesting ghost town in that the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks has taken over the town site that was saved from total extinction by a dedicated private effort starting in the 1940's, and turned over to the state in 1954 with the proviso that the ghost town not be converted into the tourist destination like Virginia City, but remain a ghost town.  Minimal preservation is accomplished, and one can walk through the buildings, including the original county courthouse that was later the main hotel (when Bannack lost the county seat to Dillon), and use your imagination as to what life must have been like in this community "back in the day".

Bannack window to the past

Former County Courthouse, then Hotel Meade.  First brick building in Montana

The luxury of wallcovering?  Or decorative draft stop?

Old city drug store in Bannack

Coolidge was a company mining town, founded by William R. Allen and named after his personal friend President Calvin Coolidge, continuing a primarily silver mining operation in the Elkhorn Mine (discovered in 1872) in 1913, but as poor economic tides continued to roll over the mine, it eventually ceased operation after multiple ownership changes in 1932, vacating a town that once boasted 350 people.

So why am I telling you this?

Looking at these three ways of representing the past was an interesting experience.  I bought ice cream in Virginia City, sitting on the wooden porch/sidewalk, imagining life at the time.  I bought a guidebook to Bannack with my admission to the site, guiding my walk-about the empty structures. Following a five mile uphill gravel ride, and a one mile walk through the woods to the Coolidge townsite, I came away with nothing but impressions of the time gone by, eerily represented in the quiet tumbledown nature of all but one structure still largely intact.  

And I must say I liked Coolidge most of all.  Seeing how the light played with the piles of wood, bent or broken as they fell, a runway for chipmunks, surrounded by trees growing up in and around these structures where streets, alive with activity, once were.  The intimacy and personality of the places was compelling - from the scraps of wallpaper still clinging, tipped outhouses, and tiny cabins that probably served a single grizzled miner, smaller even than the present tiny house craze.  A belt buckle, rusty tin cans, various scraps of metal still littered the landscape - all now protected detritus of a day gone by.  Perhaps the most compelling image was the schoolhouse, slid from its foundations likely from an earlier flood, where now a river runs through it, its crooked belfry still visible, calling the students to revisit this place.

The old schoolhouse captured by the creek

A Coolidge "secure" window to the past

Tumbledown

OK, at least one art photo!!!  Saw patterns, grain, nail shadow and green

Indeed the ghosts still live here, and in all these towns, they are visible to my minds eye, a glimpse into the past still living today.  And they will only disappear when the last vestiges of these towns are finally reclaimed by the earth from whence they came, like so many towns that have been absorbed since time began.

Thanks for the memories, ghosts!

The reclamation tool: lichens!