Ludlow: A Ghost Town That Died Twice

Ludlow is a ghost town, but it died twice. The first death was slow. The second was almost total.

The town was born in eighteen eighty-two as a water stop on the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad, which was pushing its tracks west through the Mojave. A railroad water stop sounds unglamorous, but in the desert, water was everything. The railroad needed it to replenish steam engines. Workers needed it to survive. And when borax was discovered nearby at the turn of the century, Ludlow suddenly had a purpose beyond the railroad: it became the supply point for the mines, and a small but genuine desert community took shape.

At its nineteen-teens peak Ludlow had a hotel, saloons, a school, and about five hundred residents. The mines played out, the borax era ended, and the population drained away. Then Route Sixty-Six arrived in the nineteen twenties and gave Ludlow a second life as a motor stop. Gas stations and a café served drivers crossing the Mojave. That was enough to keep the town breathing for another generation.

Interstate Forty came in nineteen seventy-three, bypassed Ludlow almost entirely, and finished the job. One by one the businesses closed. The café hung on the longest, a cinder-block place called the Ludlow Café that became something of a legend among Route Sixty-Six travelers for its stubbornness. It finally closed in the early two thousands.

Today Ludlow is famous in a specific kind of way: it is one of the most-photographed ghost towns on the old alignment because you can still see the bones of the old main street, and because the Mojave light on a collapsed building is something photographers spend hours waiting for. A Chevron station and a Dairy Queen serve the Interstate traffic nearby, entirely indifferent to the ruins a few hundred yards away.

The ruins are protected by nothing except the desert's indifference to time.