Nevada City, Montana

Early August, 2012 – Just a mile and a half from Virginia City, Montana, lies a similar gold rush ghost town: Nevada City. Curious about Montana’s gold mining history, we rode our bikes over to Nevada City to have a look. The difference between Virginia City and Nevada City is that Virginia City’s layout and historic buildings are essentially the same as they were in the 1860’s. In contrast, Nevada City got dredged out of existence long ago by massive machines that floated downriver and sifted through the riverbed, panning for gold on a colossal scale.

Gold digging dredge with 62 buckets for river mud

A dredge similar to the ones used in Alder Gulch — the river that offered up Montana gold to the prospectors of the 1860’s — is one of the first things we saw upon arriving in Nevada City. The way these dredges worked is that as they floated downstream, their conveyor of buckets dug up the riverbed and passed it through “trommels” or enormous sieves that sifted out the rocks and the gold.

Nevada City, Montana

The refuse was dumped behind the dredge, leaving “tailings” that scarred the landscape forever. Looking at the rusting, hulking mass in the grass today, it is hard to imagine the groaning and creaking and effort put out by this machine as it slowly chewed through the riverbed floor, taking out whole towns in its path, while hardworking men oversaw the operation and maintenance of all its mechanical parts. What a voracious beast!

Barber shop

The Mercantile

Nearby Virginia City’s existence today is due largely to the preservation efforts of Charles and Sue Bovey who gradually bought the city’s buildings in the 1940’s. This wasn’t a new hobby for them. They had begun collecting old buildings in Great Falls, Montana, but were eventually asked to move their collection.

A front porch…with wash tubs

Many of their buildings wound up in the “new” Nevada City which they re-assembled to be a recreation of the town that once stood there. We’ve met collectors of Pepsi memorabilia and Pez candies, things that can be housed in a bedroom. But collecting historic buildings was a new one for us!

Small buildings in those days…!

These homes aren’t very big, however. We paced out the footprints of several houses and found they were often as small as 12′ x 18′ or so, and the doorways were short, even by my standards!

Montana’s oldest standing one-room schoolhouse — with a teacher’s apartment out back

Over the years Nevada City has grown to become a repository for old buildings from all over Montana, so it is now a large collection of structures from many eras and in all stages of disintegration. The building I liked most was the little schoolhouse. It was built and used in nearby Twin Bridges and was set up with desks for about 20 tightly packed students (two to a desk). More intriguing than the 15′ x 15′ classroom was the tiny teacher’s apartment out back. It was a single room, about 12′ x 12′, with enough room for a wood stove, a wee table and chair by a single window and a twin bed.

The teacher’s apartment is through the back door of the classroom.

Our fifth wheel trailer has more than twice as much square footage! Not to mention hot and cold running water, shower, flush toilet, climate control and modern appliances that those early Montana teachers couldn’t even conceive of. How did they ever make it through those vicious Montana winters in that tiny space?

The old firehouse

The folks that ventured out west in those days were very hardy souls. Eking out a living in a tiny cabin in a region that can be buried by snow from as early as September to as late as May seems challenging enough, but many of the miners walked to the Montana gold fields from distant places like Salt Lake City and Denver.

In this day and age of pedometers, where we are urged to get off the couch and take at least 10,000 steps a day — yet still rush to grab the parking spot closest to the supermarket door — it is impossible to imagine walking hundreds of miles to apply for a job.

More upscale living at this address…

A lot of the scenery and stories and buildings of Nevada City and Virginia City made us think of favorite western movies, especially those with Clint Eastwood riding into town on a horse to save the good townspeople from some nasty group of scoundrels. But he always arrived on horseback! He’d slip off the beast with the ease and confidence of a seasoned horseman. No doubt the folks coming to Montana were seasoned horsemen, but owning a horse wasn’t in everyone’s budget. If you wanted to get there to be part of the gold mining action, you walked.

The “Wagon Shop” used to be the Yellowstone Dining Lodge

Another intriguing building was a cavernous barn-like structure that was loaded to the gills with wagons of every description. From carriages suitable for Cinderella to horse-drawn “buses” that could carry 30 people, to simple hay wagons, every conceivable rolling contraption that could be towed by a horse is in that barn. It turned out that the building itself was originally the dining hall at Yellowstone National Park. The Park Service replaced all the log buildings at the canyon with more modern structures in 1959, so Charles Bovey disassembled it and brought it to his new Nevada City.

Everything you need to build or repair a wagon is in this shop!

As we walked through the “town” we could hear the sounds of a player piano and made a bee-line to a building filled with historic automated music making gear of all kinds. One of the player pianos was acting up, and a technician was deep in the bowels of the instrument troubleshooting the problem. We got the sense the museum wasn’t really open, so we left. Unfortunately, I think we missed out on one of the prize displays in Nevada City. Oh well — good reason to go back someday!!

Happily saturated with Montana gold mining history, we made our way from Nevada City to Ennis, Montana, and Earthquake Lake.

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Virginia City Court House lit up at night.

Early August, 2012 – The history of Dillon, Montana, a town built on a railroad spur that supplied Montana’s gold camps, intrigued us, but we found the heart of Montana’s history lies in the ghost town of Virginia City.

Special effects on our buggy!

We had always thought that the 1850’s gold rush was all about California, but we learned that Montana played its part too, and Virginia City was at the center of it.

Take a tour in a fire truck

Virginia City was also the spot where Mark took a lot of the photography reading he had been doing and began applying it.  Suddenly some very interesting special effects started emerging from his camera.  What a perfect place to try out all these techniques.

History everywhere

Nowadays Virginia City is a tourist town, and you can take a tour around town in a fire truck, a horse drawn carriage or an open-air, narrow gauge rail car.

Tours are offered on open-air railcars too

A bumpy ride…

Just 132 full-time residents were living here at the time of the last census, and catering to tourists is a full-time job they all do very well.

The Brewery was easy to find

Back in the spring of 1863, however, there was nothing out here when nearby Alder Creek turned up some gold in its riverbed.  Suddenly the rush was on.

By that fall 10,000 people were scattered in the surrounding hills in a series of camps along the river’s edge in an area dubbed “Fourteen Mile City.”  Most were gold miners from California and 30% or so were Chinese.

Within a year, the Territory of Montana was carved out of the Territory of Idaho, and soon Virginia City was the capitol of Montana and its in-town population swelled to 10,000.  In the next 25 years $90 million of gold (in 1880’s dollars) was removed.

Gold was the one thing on everyone’s mind in those days, and the currency around town was gold dust valued at $16 to $18 an ounce.  What a way to pay for a beer!

Trim detail on the wooden awnings

It’s a ghost town

Life was a little raucous, I suspect.  One fellow wrote in his diary upon his arrival in Virginia City in 1865:  “There was nothing visible to remind a person in the slightest degree that it was Sunday. Every store, saloon, and dancing hall was in full blast.”

Wooden sidewalks

There are now 227 buildings in Virginia City, of which about 100 are historic. We rode our bikes around town and strolled down narrow alleys, enjoying the quirky sights of a bygone era.

The Montana Post was the first newspaper

Virginia City is known for having one of the best collections of mid-nineteenth century commercial buildings, and of course Mark found the old Brewery right away.  This place still sells beer, but it wasn’t open at the moment.

Army barracks buildings were dressed up to house the tourist workers

The Montana Post was the new capitol’s newspaper in the 1860’s, and its headquarters still stand today.  Rows of small homes line the back streets along the creek, and the wooden sidewalks with their wooden awnings evoke images of women in long dresses.

Oddly, if you peek in the open windows and doorways, there are still beds with moldy mattresses. We were told by one Virginia City worker that tourism workers used to live in these homes until fairly recently, and that one row of buildings used to be army barracks that were brought in as housing for the tourism workers.  He told us the barracks were given a false old-fashioned western-style front to fit the town’s decor.

Mark gets all kinds of special effects out of his camera

This surprised us, because so many of the town’s buildings are authentic and original to this spot.  However, Virginia City has an unusual history.  After its surge in the 1860’s — in 1866 it was the first Montana town to get a telegraph and that same year became the first Montana town to get a schoolhouse — the pursuit of gold soon took most of the townspeople away to better prospects.  There was a huge gold strike at Lost Chance Gulch, which later became Helena, and it lured most gold miners away.

Virginia City has a great collection of commercial buildings

Although Virginia City became home to the administrative headquarters for Yellowstone when it was designated as America’s first National Park in 1872, and was also a favored staging area for folks getting outfitted for expeditions into Yellowstone, the vaulted title of State Capitol eventually went to Helena where it still remains.  By 1875 Virginia City’s population had dwindled to 800 resident, leaving many of its 1200 buildings vacant.

History sags a bit sometimes

But the remains of these empty buildings are fascinating today, as they tell the story of the raw enthusiasm, energy and hopes that filled the American west during its years of greatest expansion.  Everyone was in a hurry to get rich.  The buildings were thrown together to replace the tents that first housed the miners, and there was little care about the impact of mining on the environment.

Huge pressurized water jets scoured the hills of everything, laying the rock and its gold bare.  Enormous dredges floated downstream, chewing up everything in their path, including towns.

Virginia City was spared this fate because it doesn’t sit directly on a gold vein, but nearby Nevada City and many others were swallowed up by the dredges.

Mark gets some ghostly images in this ghost town

By the 1940’s nothing was happening in Virginia City, and Charles and Sue Bovey began buying the town’s buildings with an eye towards preservation and tourism.  Virginia City already attracted a lot of curiosity seekers, and by bringing in and housing workers to run the old time shops and bars and dance hall, the Boveys created a town of living history for tourists.

Virginia City was declared a National Landmark in 1961 and soon after was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  After Charles Bovey’s death the state of Montana began buying his buildings, and today Virginia City is a state operation.

Just a few miles down the road lies Nevada City, a slightly different type of historic community, and during our stay in Virginia City we took a day trip over there to check it out.

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