Built on coal, undone by the market

Coal towns followed a different arc than the silver and gold camps. They rarely boomed overnight on a lucky strike; instead they were deliberately built — company towns with a tipple, a washer, a railroad spur, and rows of standardized houses — to feed a steady industrial appetite for fuel. Their fortunes rose and fell not with an ore body running out, but with the customers who burned what they dug: smelters, power plants, and above all the steam locomotive.

That dependence is what finished many of them. When the railroads swapped coal-fired steam for diesel-electric power in the late 1940s and 1950s, mines whose coal was best suited to raising steam lost their market almost overnight — no matter how much fuel remained underground. Add the ordinary hazards of hard-rock camps — fires, floods, labor strife, and remote geography — and you get the coal ghost towns gathered here, with their histories, what survives, and how to visit.