Silver City, Utah: The Tintic Camp Jesse Knight Tried to Turn Into a Smelter Town UtahGold & Silver MiningGhost town · Private claims and open mine workings·~11 min read Quick facts What it wasFirst commercial center of the Tintic Mining District; later Jesse Knight’s smelter town FoundedLate 1869; district organized December 13, 1869 Peak populationAbout…
Dividend was a company town built by Tintic Standard after a 1916 silver strike, dismantled in the late 1940s and now sits beside active mining ground. What the records show, and why it is a roadside view only.
Bauer, in Tooele County, was a railhead, a mine-drainage outlet, an orchard and a flotation mill before it was abandoned in 1979 and capped by the EPA. What the records show, and why it is closed to visitors.
Mammoth and Robinson were two halves of one Tintic mining community, from the 1870 Mammoth claim to the 1929 dissolution of Mammoth City. What the records support, what is folklore, and why access is limited.
Knightsville was a company mining camp on Godiva Mountain above Eureka, built in 1896–97 by Jesse Knight, who barred saloons, closed his mines on Sunday and paid a wage premium. About 1,000 people lived there at the peak. By about 1940 the houses had been moved to Eureka, and a concrete school foundation is the main thing left.
Ophir began in August 1870 when soldier-prospectors organized a mining district in a narrow Oquirrh canyon, and for about a century its mines kept coming back from the dead. Marcus Daly worked here before he became a Copper King, a ten-year-old boy survived five days in a mine nearby, and the town voted itself out of existence in 2016. Today a few dozen people still live among Utah’s oldest surviving mining-town city hall and a row of preserved buildings.
Bayhorse is one of Idaho’s most complete mining ghost towns: a remote lead-silver camp that built its own smelter, nine stone charcoal kilns, a mountainside tramway, and a tall concentration mill deep in a Salmon River canyon. It boomed around the Ramshorn mine, crashed in 1889, revived again and again into the 1920s, and is now preserved in “arrested decay” as a unit of Land of the Yankee Fork State Park. Here’s the documented history, the legends worth checking, and how to visit.
Berlin is two ghost towns in one canyon: a company-owned silver camp left to decay when the mine closed around 1911, and — in the same Shoshone Range — a bonebed of 50-foot Triassic sea reptiles that became Nevada’s state fossil. Nevada State Parks preserves both in “arrested decay.” Here’s the documented history, the legends worth checking, and how to visit.
Silver Reef is the ghost town that shouldn’t have existed: the only place in North America where commercial silver was mined from sandstone, in a boisterous non-Mormon mining camp dropped into the heart of Utah’s Dixie. Here’s the geology that baffled the experts, the legends worth separating from the record, and how to walk the ruins at Leeds today.
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.