A silver strike in 1865 made Belmont the seat of Nye County and one of central Nevada’s grandest camps. When the ore ran out, departing families carried off the very roofs — leaving a townscape of standing stone walls and an 1876 courthouse that still presides over Main Street.
Jim Butler’s 1900 silver strike ended Nevada’s twenty-year slump and built the “Queen of the Silver Camps.” Unlike its neighbors, Tonopah never became a true ghost town — it survives as Nye County’s seat and a living monument to the mining West.
Unionville boomed on 1860s silver as the seat of Humboldt County — and it is where a young Samuel Clemens failed at prospecting before becoming Mark Twain. Today it is a living ghost town of 27 in Buena Vista Canyon.