Calico: The Ghost Town as Product Test

Calico was a real mining town, and then it was a ruin, and then Walter Knott bought the ruin and turned it into something harder to name.

The silver at Calico was discovered in eighteen eighty-one, and for the next twenty-five years the mines produced an estimated eighty-six million dollars in silver and thirteen million in borax. At its peak, Calico had a population of several thousand, multiple newspapers, a school, and the infrastructure of a functioning desert community. By nineteen oh-seven the ore was exhausted. By nineteen sixteen the last residents had left. The town sat empty in the Calico Mountains for thirty-five years, the wooden buildings slowly collapsing, the adobe slowly dissolving back into the hillside.

In nineteen fifty-one, Walter Knott bought the townsite. Knott was simultaneously developing the Ghost Town section at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, his amusement park built around the mythology of the American West. Calico was, in effect, his research site. What worked at Calico, what visitors responded to, what felt authentic enough to draw a crowd, informed the commercial Western mythology he was building fifty miles to the southwest.

Knott's approach to Calico was both preservation and performance. He stabilized genuine surviving structures. He rebuilt collapsed buildings. He added reconstructions where the originals were gone entirely. The result, when he donated the property to San Bernardino County in nineteen sixty-six, was a townsite where the authentic and the reconstructed stand side by side and are, in most cases, visually indistinguishable.

The Jan MacKell Collins account of Calico's history is the most detailed available, and Collins is characteristically direct about the complexity: Calico is a ghost town that is also a theme park, and a theme park that is also a ghost town. Both descriptions are accurate. Neither is complete.

The mining violence of the original town, the accidents, the labor disputes, the periodic murders that are part of the historical record of most California silver camps, is not part of the story Calico tells about itself today. That is also part of what Walter Knott built.